


Taught By Thirst

by jenlee1



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Medically Necessary Bathtub Snuggling, Mission Fic, Oral Sex, Partners to Lovers, Philanthropy Era, Porn with Feelings, Post-Tanker Fic, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:35:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25138579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenlee1/pseuds/jenlee1
Summary: He remembers the night in flashes.
Relationships: Otacon/Solid Snake
Comments: 50
Kudos: 154





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Consider this a teaser, of sorts. Subsequent chapters will be longer.

He remembers the night in flashes.

Vomiting bile and filthy salt water, lungs burning, his face pressed to the smooth wooden floor of a tiny, rocking boat in the dark. His head hurts. His stomach hurts.

He’s not dead, evidently, for reasons he doesn’t immediately understand. He remembers the screams of drowning men, the hiss and click of the Codec giving way to the rush of water in his ears, and kicking out hard for the far-off glimmering grey of the surface – then nothing. Dark. And cold, down to his bones. 

He makes an aborted attempt to push himself up, but his arms are numb and shaking. 

Nauseous. Shallow breaths. Lie still.

 _Hypoxia_ , his brain supplies. _Hypothermia._

_Hypo-fucking-everything._

God, he’s tired.

He has no memory of the hands reaching down through the black water, grabbing his harness and hauling him bodily out of the harbor – out of harm’s way – but he knows they must have been there. _(Aren’t they always?)_

Somewhere below, the tanker groans like a dying thing over the gurgling whine of a struggling outboard motor as the little boat tips and pitches on the waves.

Oddly, he feels safe.

******

Something soft and dry under his head.

Shaking fingers working at the snaps and buckles of his suit, while the only voice in the world he trusts whispers prayers to a deity he knows for a fact that neither of them believe in. Hands feeling carefully over his chest and sides, checking. Checking.

He reaches up with one hand, catches the slender wrist in a gentle grip.

“Concussion,” he rasps. His voice is hoarse. “Fucking thing hits hard.”

Otacon huffs out a small sound that could have been a laugh, under better circumstances.

“No kidding,” he says. “Anywhere else?”

“No.”

The light is too bright. He’s shivering in earnest now, which he dimly realizes is a good thing. The scratch of musty woolen blankets on bare skin is grounding, somehow, smelling faintly of moth balls and cat piss. 

_Home is where the heart is._ Or something like that.

He chokes on the wet, scratching burn in his chest, rolls to the side to catch his breath. Presses his forehead to the dusty pillow. _Christ, it hurts._ Relaxes just a fraction at the familiar sting of an alcohol wipe on the crusted blood in his hair.

The beleaguered mattress squeaks under his partner’s knee, leaning over him, protective. He isn’t complaining.

Somewhere in the street below, a far-off siren wails. No rest for the weary.

“We need to move,” he says.

“I know. I’m on it.”

Blessedly, the light clicks off _(or doesn’t?)_ , and darkness descends again.

******

He jolts awake with a hiss through gritted teeth, as the old car judders over a row of potholes that have no business on any self-respecting city street. 

Otacon swears under his breath, glancing quickly in his direction.

_Sorry._

Rose-gold light creeps up the horizon to the east, blurring in and out of focus. His head throbs along with his heartbeat as rolling hills and studded guardrails flash past. Farm country. 

Pennsylvania, maybe. Or Maryland.

He lets his eyes fall closed again.

Beside him, Otacon shifts in his seat. He fidgets when he’s worried – always has. Grips the steering wheel too tight. Chews his lower lip until it bleeds.

A hand rests briefly on his knee, gives a careful squeeze.

“Hey. Still with me?”

He grunts, vaguely affirmative.

“Watch the road,” he says, without any rancor. “M’alright.”

And it’s the truth, or close enough. He breathes, slow and careful. Doesn’t cough. It’s something. 

Outside, rain patters softly on the roof of the car – summer on the east coast, with its smells of wet dirt and trampled grass. A far cry from the biting cold and sharp, sun-bright clarity of Alaska. But maybe that’s okay. An even trade, or something better.

New York recedes behind them, and the highway unfurls ahead.

Tomorrow, back to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title comes from Emily Dickinson's "Water, Is Taught By Thirst":
> 
> Water, is taught by thirst.  
> Land - by the Oceans passed.  
> Transport - by Throe -  
> Peace - by its battles told -  
> Love - by Memorial Mold -  
> Birds, by the Snow.


	2. Chapter 2

_A clusterfuck_ , he thinks. It’s apt.

It’s not a term that he would use, normally – something Snake would say – but he has to admit, there are times when nothing other than the coarse, colorful simplicity of an unspeakable sex act that isn’t going well will truly suffice as a descriptor. 

See also: a shit show. But that doesn’t really capture the full gravity of the situation, does it?

So – a clusterfuck it is, and that’s that.

He can be decisive when it counts.

It takes less time than he might have imagined to corral the detritus of their lives for the past few weeks into something a single person can carry – even if it takes a few trips. Laptop and hard drives stowed in their protective cases, clothing in a pair of duffel bags. Tactical gear in boxes in the trunk.

Quick. Economical. No wasted steps, and no panicked flailing.

_Don’t think. Just move._

They’ve practiced this, which helps.

All told, he estimates less than an hour for the car to be loaded and packed. Out of the dusty old walk-up with its mildew stains and peeling wallpaper. Empty, as if they were never there. Like ghosts. He won’t miss it. 

With great reluctance, he stashes the USP under the center console, shoved out of sight between the seat cushions in ready reach of his right hand if something happens. ( _Like what?_ Never mind that. Things he doesn’t want to dwell on.) They need a route out, now, and he pulls their notated and dog-eared city map from the glove compartment to squint at it under the glare of the dome light. 

Side streets, away from the harbor. Watch out for checkpoints. Loop around to the west, and across the state line into New Jersey. Do it now, while there’s still too much confusion on the ground for an effective sweep of the area.

They should be okay, if they’re quick and careful.

But that’s always the trick, isn’t it?

This isn’t his role, not usually, and the weight of it sits uncomfortably across his shoulders. His partner is the tactician. The soldier. The steady hand, deftly steering them both through the sirens and searchlights when things get hairy.

But not tonight.

The car winds its way through back alleys and residential neighborhoods. Not too fast. Another thirty minutes to some semblance of a main thoroughfare, and from there he turns away from the coast and allows himself a few deep breaths.

He drives through the night in relative silence, with only his thoughts for company.

******

Beside him, Snake sleeps.

This is to be expected, but he still finds it unnerving – there’s something in his stillness, slumped bonelessly against the window, that’s too reminiscent of the lifeless body he had hauled from the water just a few short hours ago.

_Please, God. Don’t let him be dead._

He shakes himself.

Quiet nights on the road are nothing new, of course. Philanthropy has never had any regular home base to speak of, and for an official NGO with a high-minded mission statement and bona fide UN recognition – although _that’s_ probably out the window, now – it often feels like they spend more of their time in a beat-up rental car winding their way from one dilapidated motel room to the next than doing much of anything else.

On long stretches of empty highway, especially overnight, this is how it goes – one drives, the other dozes. Simple. Practical. He’s covered more miles to the sound of his partner snoring in the passenger seat than he can honestly recall, at the moment.

But this is different.

Snake is a restless sleeper at the best of times, and frequently interjects on matters of radio station selection or Otacon’s overly cautious driving as they pass through inhabited areas. He grumbles about road construction and detours. His eyes flick back and forth under closed lids when he dreams.

Now, he sleeps heavily.

Unmoving, unnaturally still. He surfaces once in the grey pre-dawn twilight between Lewisburg and Altoona, but he’s groggy – exhausted and in pain, and Otacon lets him slip under again without much argument.

He seems coherent, so at least there’s that.

Because God only knows what they’re going to do if he’s bleeding into his brain, or develops pneumonia, or any of the other dozens of possible complications that could arise from whatever the fuck just happened back there. He’s not a doctor, goddamnit – well, he _is_ , but not the kind that’s going to be of any particular use right now – and they can’t risk a hospital, so it is what it is.

_Please. I can’t lose you, too._

******

Reluctantly, as the morning sun creeps higher and the dashboard sensor begins to ping insistently, he stops for gas. He chooses the pump furthest from the glass door of the attached convenience store, scans the lot surreptitiously as the fuel sloshes lazily in. 

No one turns off the road behind them. Though of course, that doesn’t mean much.

He closes the gas cap and replaces the pump, swings his legs back into the car. 

From the passenger side, suddenly, a man approaches. “Hey, fella!”

Otacon startles, and his hand fumbles under the console. 

He bends to peer in through the half-open window, smiling. Ample belly, congenial. Not a military type. “Any idea if they’re still doing work on 219 through Johnstown? Saw you come up from that direction,” he explains. Friendly. He rests a hand on top of the car and glances curiously at Snake, still out for the count.

The gun is cold under his fingers, slick with sweat.

“I, uh – yeah, actually. I think so. We sat in it for a bit. Couple of miles, maybe?”

“Well, goddamn,” drawls the man. “Never ends, does it? Reckon we’ll go around.” He gives a nod and saunters away. 

Otacon waits, heart thudding in his ears, and watches the car disappear down the road. Sits another five minutes to be sure. Nothing happens. He draws his hand back, finally, and eases back out onto the highway. 

******

Around lunchtime, he gets his first inkling that their problems are bigger than he’d imagined.

The radio crackles in and out in the rural no-man’s-land between cities, and he fiddles anxiously with the tuning knob. An oldies station, a jingle for a local car dealership. Garbled snatches of NPR.

Finally, he hits on what he’s looking for.

The tanker explosion has hit the news - not a surprise. A “developing situation.” 

Environmental disaster, estimated 20 million gallons of crude oil ( _which is a bald-faced lie, but okay_ ), clean-up efforts underway. Conspicuously absent is any mention of the Marines and their brand new, state-of-the-art weapons system that happens to have been hijacked by a Russian double agent… but, well. He hadn’t really expected anything different.

And then, the kicker.

A clear act of domestic terrorism. Shockingly, the apparent work of former Shadow Moses hero Solid Snake of recent book-related fame, for nefarious reasons unknown - but the evidence is all there. Ironclad, incontrovertible. A stunning development to be sure, and doesn’t it always feel like a betrayal when our role models fail us and turn out to be no better than villains themselves?

America is collectively dismayed _(dismayed!_ ), and so is the perky news anchor.

Federal authorities are involved, and a manhunt is currently underway. Further details at six.

Realization twists in his gut like ice water, and for a moment he thinks he might literally throw up.

_Of course._

Jesus fucking Christ.

This was not a garden variety recon operation that went sideways. This was a set-up, from the start. 

How Ocelot’s team knew about E.E., he can’t even begin to imagine – but there it is. An _anonymous tip_. There’s a reason they don’t take those. A whole host of reasons, and he ignored them all. For what? 

For a chance to make good on his own failings. For his own stupid curiosity. For some vague idea of a Hallmark family reunion and maybe some closure after all these years, and he had walked them both headlong into a trap.

They’ve been outplayed - _masterfully_ \- and he isn’t the one who will suffer for it. It’s there on the radio, in the newscaster’s smug-earnest voice and his partner face down in the water. Pale and still beside him, in the car.

He taps the brake and turns off the highway. _Careful, careful._ Coasts to a stop on the shoulder with gravel crunching beneath the tires, and quite suddenly it’s all too much. 

He folds his hands on top of the wheel, presses his forehead against them, and breathes. The air in the car is warm and humid. Suffocating.

One breath. Two. Three. Four.

_Keep it together, Hal. Don’t do this now._

Traffic whizzes past sporadically, indifferent.

At this point – _thank God_ – Snake sits up, scrubs a hand over his face, and opines matter-of-factly that Otacon looks like shit.

Which is probably a pretty fair assessment of the situation, if he’s being honest.

So he concedes the point, and they stop.

******

The motel is on par with their usual fare - off the beaten path, and seedy enough to take cash with no ID. They only need a few hours, anyway. Enough to regroup. Grab a shower and stretch their legs, and figure out what the hell to do next. 

He’s coming up on thirty-six hours now with no sleep, but he isn’t _tired_ \- not really. Just jittery, with worry and guilt and too much caffeine, which feels somehow worse. Was it really only yesterday afternoon that they were running through their last-minute equipment checks? It was laughably straightforward, as covert ops went. Get the photos and get out. Back home in time for takeout Chinese and maybe a stupid sci-fi movie. 

_(It Came From Outer Space, or The Thing?_

_Don’t care, as long as it doesn’t have subtitles. You pick this time.)_

He takes a key card from the greasy-haired man behind the counter, and they haul their boxes inside.

The room has threadbare carpet that looks like it hasn’t been steam-cleaned since the eighties, the old a/c unit whines irritably in the window, and it all feels so familiar it almost hurts. It could be any other shitty motel, another workday. Just the two of them on the road to their next objective, if not for the cold grip of something clenched like a vice behind his rib cage and the careful way Snake moves.

If he’s learned anything from the past two years, it’s this – nothing that should be simple ever is. 

But sometimes he still forgets.

******

He emerges from the tiny bathroom some twenty minutes later in sweats and an old T-shirt, rubbing at his hair with a towel. Snake is sitting with his feet propped up on the cheap work desk by the mirror, staring balefully at the television.

“So,” he says dryly. “Guessing this is going to put a damper on our funding this quarter.”

“Yeah. We’re a full-fledged terrorist organization now, apparently. Makes it hard to get backers.” Otacon rubs at the space between his eyebrows, suddenly exhausted. “Jesus. They’re pinning the whole thing on you. On _us_ , I mean, but – it’s your photo all over the news.”

He grunts. “Right. The Cypher. Fuckers had it all planned out.”

There is nothing he can say to that.

Snake glances up in his direction, and Otacon doesn’t miss the quick head turn as the afternoon sun filtering in through the window blinds falls across his face.

“Light still hurting your eyes?”

He shrugs. “It’s better. Vision’s almost back to normal. Give it another day or two, probably.”

Otacon watches, helpless. _I’m sorry_ , he wants to blurt out. He hasn’t said it. He can’t. It hovers between them like a physical weight, but the words catch and die in his chest.

Instead, he grabs the first aid kit from his bag. It needs refilling.

“I need to check your head again, anyway. Scoot over here a minute.”

He perches on the end of the bed, and Snake shifts to the side to let him see. This is familiar, too – the tilt of Snake’s head, trusting, patient while he works. There’s only a little blood, long since dried. Pupils equal and reactive. So far, so good.

It doesn’t make him feel any better.

On television, a DHS spokesman is giving a press conference. Despite a thorough sweep of the surrounding area, no sign of the perpetrator at the scene – for now, it appears that the man known as Solid Snake has vanished without a trace. There is speculation that he may have been killed in the explosion, but as of yet, no remains have been recovered. Search efforts are ongoing.

The department will of course provide regular updates on the investigation as it develops. No further questions at this time.

_All right._

No leads, then. They’re safe enough for now. He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until Snake’s voice startles him from his thoughts.

“That’s thanks to you, you know.” He nods at the TV, expressionless. “You did good.”

“Oh. I mean – thanks. I guess. I don’t know. ‘Good’ seems pretty generous, considering.”

“You got us out.” Snake is still looking at him steadily. “Sure as hell beats the alternatives.”

It does, probably. Small comfort though it is.

There’s something prickling behind his eyes, suddenly, and Otacon can’t hold his gaze. He clears his throat, busies his hands with the medical supplies – everything back in its place. Gauze pads, disinfectant, adhesive dressings. Little tubes of ointment in their slots. 

Snake, who is more perceptive than Otacon sometimes gives him credit for, lets the subject drop.

He stands and turns away, returning the zippered case to his bag. “I’m, ah – just going to lay down for a while, okay? See if I can squeeze in a nap before everything gets crazy again.”

Back in the bathroom, he splashes water on his face and stands for a time in front of the mirror. He can still smell the river on his skin, under the cheap shampoo and bar soap – burning diesel fuel and something sharper, more metallic. 

Chlorine, maybe? No. That isn’t right. 

_You’re losing it, Hal._

Curled up on top of the sheets, on the bed furthest from the window, he feigns sleep for what feels like a long time before the roaring in his ears finally quiets.

******

_On the boat, again. Dark. Rain stings his face like tiny needles._

_It plays out like a movie, somehow – the ending already fixed, and he knows it, dreads it, but can’t remember why. His limbs move inexorably, like a puppet’s, without conscious thought. Strangely numb._

_The body under his hands is heavy and limp. (They call it “dead weight” for a reason, don’t they?)_

_Pinch the nose, head back. Breathe. Salt water in his mouth, the lingering taste of cigarettes. His partner’s lips are tinged with blue, eyes half-open and staring at nothing and this time, it doesn’t change._

_Wake up. Please, God, wake up._

_He’s moving in slow motion, like slogging through mud. There is no sound._

_One-two-three-four-five._

_Breathe._

_Breathe._

_When he lifts his head again, the rain has stopped. The sun shines overhead, on a different day, in a different place. The water is clear. Far below, hardly visible, his eyes catch on the wavering image of a wheelchair as it sinks out of sight, into the mud._

_Somewhere in the distance, a woman’s voice is sobbing. A little girl with dark hair and wide, terrified eyes sits curled under the seat beside him. The still form beneath his hands doesn’t move._

_He lowers his head, vision graying at the edges. The world narrows to a single, terrible point of focus._

_One-two-three-four-five._

_Breathe._

_Breathe._

******

The sun is still there when he opens his eyes, but it’s lower now – slanting in through the dusty window over the distant sounds of traffic outside. A lazy dinnertime sort of sunshine, in the summer. 

The dream has left him foggy and disoriented, and at first he can’t place the room. Not Alaska, not New York. Not his childhood bedroom, above the pool. But, there – his brain snags on the familiar smell of cleaning solvent and the soft scrape of a copper brush, and the last vestiges of panic ebb away like echoes in a rainstorm before he can quite remember the rest.

He fumbles drowsily on the nightstand for his glasses.

Sitting cross-legged on the other bed is Snake, with the disassembled parts of his M9 spread out neatly on a towel in front of him. He glances up in acknowledgement, then returns his attention to the task at hand. Otacon watches his hands move deftly over the weapon, practiced and steady. Unhurried. Checking the firing mechanism, oiling the slide rails, running the little round brush through the barrel.

He can do this too, when needed – Snake has taught him how, since he might as well be useful and equipment maintenance of one kind or another is a never-ending chore – but there’s something quietly captivating about watching his partner work. He locks the slide back into place and reseats the magazine, checks the safety, then gets up to place the gun carefully on the work desk. 

“Good as new,” he says, using the towel to wipe excess oil from his hands. “Damn saltwater gets in everything.”

It does, for a fact.

Otacon sits up, stretching. “Any action?”

“Not much. A few new check-ins. Couple of johns, with their ladies of the evening.” He glances out the window. “Afternoon still, I guess. Classy place.”

“That’s why I’m not touching the bedspreads.” 

Snake is inspecting the discarded sneaking suit now, methodically checking the clasps and fittings for damage. A normal part of their after-mission routine, albeit perhaps a bit more necessary than usual this time. 

“Sleep another hour or two, if you want. No army beating down the gate just yet.”

“No, I’m up.” He already knows there will be no more sleep for him right now. “I need to run a systems check, anyway. See if we can piggyback some kind of secure connection out here, get those photos uploaded. Maybe give the powers that be something else to pay attention to for a while, anyway.”

He levers himself out of bed with an effort, begins digging in one of the boxes for his laptop. 

“Right. So – let’s talk strategy,” says Snake bluntly. Otacon waits. “We’re going to have a hell of a time out here, dodging the feds and Ocelot’s men. Not sure I like our chances.”

“I know,” he says wearily. It’s been weighing on his mind, too. “For sure, I mean - we need some leads on a new safehouse, at the very least. I made a call to Mei Ling earlier. She’s going to turn over some rocks for us, see what she can come up with.”

It’s not enough, and he knows it. But what else can they do?

Snake isn’t finished. “If they could prove I was dead, they’d stop looking.” 

“Okay. Um. I hate to point out the obvious here, but - ”

“DHS is still out there, dragging the harbor. They will be for a while, yet. Shit tons of debris to go through." He pauses. "So. What if they find a body?”

“But they won’t.”

“But they _could_.” He stares meaningfully at Otacon, waiting for him to catch up.

“Oh,” he says finally. “ _Oh_. I, ah. Yes. I guess that… could work, couldn’t it?”

 _Dear God._ If the situation weren’t so dire, he’d be fighting the urge to giggle at the sheer absurdity of what they’re considering.

Snake sits back, his eyes gleaming with determination. 

“My brother caused a lot of trouble for both of us when he was alive. It’s about time he paid some of that back.”


	3. Chapter 3

The first point of business, as always, is research. 

Information-gathering is his purview – one of the things he’s best at, or at least he’s always thought so – and he takes it very seriously. Right now, he’s grateful for a task to focus on. Something productive. So he fires up the laptop and starts hunting.

Snake sits at the work desk with his legal pad, and makes notes.

And so it goes.

Every mission they’ve ever run together, whether it’s a complex large-scale infiltration project or a quick grab-and-go at a deserted warehouse in the middle of nowhere, has begun the same way – with a careful consideration of the risks involved, and an honest assessment of what they think they can accomplish given the situation they have to work with.

There is a cool-headed logic to planning tactical operations, just as there is to coding a program.

He appreciates the symmetry.

As it happens, for this particular mission, there are several points working in their favor.

Point one: The facility where Liquid’s body is being stored is run by a private corporation based in Virginia – Cryocor Industries, LLC. Which means their plan is at least theoretically workable, in terms of distance. It’s conceivable that they can make it there and then back up the coast to Manhattan before their window of opportunity closes. 

Point two: The building itself is a free-standing structure on the outskirts of Alexandria, three floors, totaling around 100,000 square feet in all. Not _tiny_ , by any means, but a far simpler target than a sprawling army base in terms of logistics. More lightly guarded, too – it’s a civilian facility, with a small rotating after-hours security staff. 

Point three: Mei Ling has come through with a safehouse location in rural Delaware, which is far enough away from any hot spots to avoid arousing undue suspicion, but close enough to use as a pre-op staging area as well as a place to lay low for a few weeks when it’s all said and done. His nerves are frayed to the breaking point, Snake is barely on his feet, and they’re both in dire need of a chance to hole up and recharge as soon as the current crisis is sorted out.

So – all encouraging signs.

There’s only one major stumbling block that he can see, but it’s a big one. Would be a deal breaker, in fact, except that they need to make this happen in the next forty-eight hours if it’s going to happen at all, and they don’t have any other real options.

Snake is in no shape to be doing a field operation right now, and they both know it.

Some lingering tightness in his chest, and some intermittent dizziness. A persistent headache that’s worse when he tries to do any fine focus work, judging from the amount of Advil he’s downing and the way he rubs at his eyes when he thinks Otacon isn’t watching. He steadies himself with a hand on the back of his chair when he stands – just for a second, hardly enough to notice. 

Perhaps most troublingly, he also coughs. Not often, perhaps three or four times over the course of the evening while they both sit engrossed in their work. And after all, that’s probably not unusual for a few days after a near-drowning incident – hasn’t he read that somewhere? It seems logical to think so, at any rate. But it doesn’t seem to improve as the night wears on and so for that reason alone, it bears watching. 

They split a protein bar dug out of glove compartment in the car for dinner (or what passes for it, today) with a bottle of water each from the vending machine outside. Snake crumbles it in his hands and puts one piece at a time into his mouth, grimly methodical. Like the chalky peanut butter taste turns his stomach, but he knows he needs the calories to function. 

If the situation were different, they would wait. 

But it isn’t – and they can’t – so they put their effort into making the plan as airtight as possible.

******

They’re back on the road before midnight, heading southeast. 

Another hour, another mile marker – and this, at least, feels normal. 

The safehouse is a tiny, one bedroom bungalow that’s seen better days. The siding is dingy and barely attached in places, and they have to slog through a thicket of weeds to reach the front door. But it sits on a wooded three-acre lot with no neighbors in sight, and has functioning basic utilities – which makes it far from the worst place they’ve ever stayed. 

He makes a mental note to send Mei Ling a fruit basket, if they’re still alive this time next week.

Inside, there isn’t much. Bedroom, bathroom, a tiny kitchen. A microwave and a coffee pot, which he notes with a faintly ridiculous sense of relief. A sofa with springs that squeak like rusty hinges, and a rickety little table with a matching straight-backed chair. Discoloration and mildew stains in one corner of the living room suggest a chronic leaky roof, at least in places – but the morning dawns clear and dry so far, so that’s a problem for another day.

Snake shrugs, and pronounces it damn near luxurious compared to a poncho in a wet foxhole. 

When viewed in that light, it’s really quite a cozy little place.

They need to be ready to make their move this evening when the sun goes down, which gives them the entire morning and most of the afternoon to get the particulars ironed out. It’s not enough time for the kind of thorough prep work he prefers. Not even close. But it’s what they’ve got.

Forty-five minutes to get his array of computer equipment unboxed and working, spilling over the little kitchen table as well as every available inch of nearby counter space onto the floor. (“Sorry,” he notes apologetically. “If you want breakfast, you’ll have to manage standing up.”) He has it down to a science by now. The internet connection is spotty, but he can make do.

He’s settled in the chair, hunched over the keyboard and probing intently at Cryocor’s firewall before the sun is fully up over the horizon.

******

Several hours later – _finally_ – he feels reasonably sure that he has everything he can get. Satellite photos, courtesy of the US government and a few other particularly generous world powers who have no idea they’re helping out. Blueprints and tax records from the county clerk’s office in Alexandria. A basic understanding of the facility’s electronic security protocols and record-keeping systems.

A nice piece of work in a frankly impossible time frame, if he does say so himself. 

Snake wanders out of the bedroom with the sneaking suit half on, bare-chested, just as he’s putting the finishing touches on the remote access program they’ll need for Cryocor’s filing system. It’s distracting for all the usual reasons – plus some new ones, maybe – but he keeps his eyes resolutely fixed on the scrolling lines of code as his partner leans over the chair back behind him, one hand resting absently on his shoulder. 

He taps a few keys, cracks his knuckles, and closes the program. _There._ A slapdash effort, maybe, but it’ll get the job done.

“Okay,” he says. “Are you ready for this?”

“What am I looking at?” Snake blinks at the computer screen, with the bemused look he always gets when Otacon tries to explain the particulars of what he’s doing.

“No, it’s really simple! I’m not going to recap all the leg work, I promise. Look, here’s the floor plan – as nearly as I can tell, anyway. I can’t guarantee everything is exactly the way it looks here, but should be close enough to give you an idea of where you’re going. The area that’s open to the public is pretty standard for a commercial space. Front door, lobby, some kind of conference room off to the side. Restrooms. The usual stuff.” He points, tracing the various spots with his index finger. “The storage area for the bodies – _patients_ , they call them, which actually seems a lot creepier – is here.” 

He indicates a large, rectangular room in the rear of the building. “First floor, so that makes things easier. There’s an access door in the back that leads directly out to the parking lot – the tanks have to be replenished with liquid nitrogen once a week, so that’s where the trucks pull up.”

“Nice,” says Snake. “So in and out, directly into the storage room?”

“Unfortunately, no. The access door is an aluminum shutter on a manual system – you have to physically pull the chain from inside, like an old-school garage door, so there’s no way to open it from the back. So, here’s what I’m thinking. The front door’s too visible, right? But look at this – there’s a fire exit over here, on the south side of the building. It looks like there’s a dumpster right outside, too, which should help block the line of sight from the roadway in case anyone happens to be passing by. I really think that’s your best entry point.”

Snake nods in agreement. “Looks like it opens into some kind of maintenance hallway, right? Not exactly high profile.”

“Right. Going by their security staff payroll records, they don’t keep more than a handful of after-hours guards on duty at a time. This isn’t Fort Knox. No idea what their patrol routes might look like, unfortunately, but it’s probably a safe bet that the custodial areas aren’t a big priority.”

“Now,” he continues, “it looks like the outer doors are all on an electronic keycard system. I can bypass that remotely – basically just tricking the system into thinking a valid card has been swiped. Easy peasy. Once you’re in, head upstairs to the security office on the third floor.”

“Why bother with that? I can go straight up the hallway and take a right, past the doors out to the lobby, and into the storage room. Right?”

He grimaces. “Yeah, but we don’t know which… uh, ‘patient,’ to take with us. I doubt if they’ve got names on the outside of the capsules, so we need access to their internal database first. I can find what we need in their filing system, but it’s not online so the only way to get in is by physically logging on to one of the network computers on-site.”

“Hn. So I get to take the scenic route all over the building?” 

“Hey, don’t look at me. If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears. Anyway, the program is on a thumb drive, you know the drill – you just have to plug it in, and I can do the rest.”

Snake grunts at that. “Fine. Then back downstairs, grab the body, and out.”

“Right. Nothing to it. Thirty minutes, tops.”

Showtime, almost. They’ll be fine. 

He wishes he felt as certain as he had a few days ago. He’s lost some of the illusions he had about what they’re doing, and the empty space left in their wake is distinctly uncomfortable.

“Sounds like a plan." And just like that, it’s decided. If Snake has any reservations, he doesn’t voice them. Instead, he clears his throat pointedly, indicating the flapping nylon sleeves and straps dangling in a shapeless tangle from his waist. “Anyway. Little help, here?”

The suit has always been a two-person job, but never more so than today. 

It’s a strangely intimate process. Snake, as always, looks quietly into the middle distance to avoid staring him down and Otacon, as always, steps close enough to feel his rib cage expand under his hands with each breath and tries gamely not to pay any particular attention to the way the suit material snugs up over the sharply defined muscles of his stomach and chest as he adjusts the fit. This is important, and he needs to get it right.

Ten-odd years’ worth of old scars stand out in sharp relief as he works, which isn’t new – the white line of a long-ago knife wound along the curve of Snake’s left side, a hollowed-out furrow that must have been left by a bullet graze on one upper arm. What looks like a burn, in a neat round circle just above his left wrist.

He doesn’t know the details, mostly, and doesn’t want to. Today, he has a hard time looking away.

The sleeves are next, eased into position with a bit more care than usual, along with the flexible silicone pads that protect his joints. 

Snake looks the part, now – all deadly power and grace, alert and confident as ever and he could almost, _almost_ , believe that nothing is wrong.

He’s wholly unprepared for the rush of emotion that comes as his partner turns around with the rear zipper and fittings of the suit still gapping open, ready for him to finish up, and he catches sight of his bare back for the first time since the night everything happened. It’s not an overstatement to say that he’s seen less dramatic bruising on murder victims or people in fatal car accidents, at least on the news or in the mindless action movies Snake sometimes likes to watch when they have cable. 

“Holy shit,” he says, before he can stop himself. “That’s... I mean. _Shit._ You look like you got hit by a truck.” 

Which probably isn’t that far from the truth, actually. A walking bipedal tank is probably worse. Snake doesn’t argue the point – just goes on tightening the holster straps around his right thigh like there’s nothing unusual about any of this.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was that bad?”

“It’s not. Not much to do about it, anyway. It’ll heal. Just sore as hell right now.”

He stares at the mottled, half-hidden evidence of what was clearly a crushing impact across Snake’s shoulder blades, angry olive-purple inkblots fading in hazy lines down toward the small of his back. It looks ‘sore’ in the same way the Sahara desert might be called ‘a little warm at times.’ 

“You need something for it?”

“Nah. Pretty sure half my blood volume is ibuprofen, at this point. The nanos can do the rest.”

Snake holds himself carefully still as he works, tightening the web of high-grade nylon lacing across the lower torso and checking the fit of the harness over his shoulders before sliding up the last zipper at the nape of his partner’s neck. The material is cool and smooth under his fingers. Form-fitting, like a second skin. 

Not for the first time, he marvels at how absurdly fragile it seems. 

******

The old Toyota they’ve been driving since April won’t suit their needs for this particular project, so – with some regret, at least on Otacon’s part – they ditch it in favor of a rented cargo van with enough space for a bevy of computer equipment set up and running on a makeshift work station of empty boxes, and at least one frozen human body. The seats up front are hard and boxy and the shocks are worn to the point of being non-existent, but a bumpy ride is probably the least of their worries right now so he doesn’t complain.

No windows in the back, for obvious reasons.

Snake asserts that he’s perfectly capable of driving, given that he’ll be infiltrating a building full of armed guards in a few hours and truthfully, it’s hard to argue with his reasoning. Otacon suspects that he wants some semblance of control, again. He’s not accustomed to sitting on the sidelines while the bullets are flying (even metaphorically), and if captaining their dented, rattling chariot across the Delaware countryside will help him get his legs back under him, he’s happy to cede the steering wheel.

On the winding two-lane highway between Dover and Annapolis, pickings on the radio are slim. There’s a painful stretch where the only alternative to the grating hiss of static is an old-style country station, which makes Otacon groan aloud. “I _can’t_ ,” he says, throwing his head back and grinding the heels of his hands into his forehead as the crackling white noise coalesces into something recognizable at last. Snake quirks an eyebrow at him, amused. “What? You hate it, too.”

“It was all we heard, down in Florida,” he says. “MacDill, for a while. With SOCOM. Brings back memories.”

“I can’t imagine you in Florida. Hawaiian shirts. Birkenstocks.”

“Not on a military base,” he says. “They’re pretty much the same wherever you go. Just the geography changes.”

Snake braces a forearm across the top of the wheel to hold it steady while he lights a cigarette with his other hand, and for once Otacon can’t muster even a token objection. He closes his eyes as the tinny voice of Hank Williams – or is it Johnny Cash? He can never keep any of them straight – oozes from the speakers on either side of the dashboard. 

It’s the best he’s felt in days, in spite of everything – the music, the smoke. The likely impending forfeiture of their rental deposit, for the van. 

Snake inhales deeply, stifles a cough with the back of his fist. _There it is, again._ Cracks the driver’s side window, as if that helps.

“So,” he says. Casual. “Are you gonna tell me what’s bothering you?” 

He waits a beat – for the inevitable denial, presumably – but it doesn’t come. 

“You haven’t looked me in the eye since we left New York. I know you pretty well, Hal, but mind-reading’s not my strong suit.”

Here it is. And really, he’s been expecting this – owes Snake an explanation, an _answer_ , and he knows it. But for all that, the words won’t come. He can’t explain. Doesn’t know the answer himself. He fucked up royally, and here they are. What more is there to say?

The question sits between them, patient. He takes a breath. 

This is something he has to do.

“My father died when I was in high school,” he begins abruptly, without preamble. “I don’t think I ever told you, did I? He – drowned. In our pool.”

The great, yawning gap between this and what he actually wants to say suddenly feels insurmountable, and he lapses back into helpless silence. 

“I’m… sorry?” Snake offers at last, clearly puzzled. He glances away from the road, just briefly, in Otacon’s direction. Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn’t this.

He shakes his head, hard. “Don’t be. He, ah. I mean – we weren’t close.” Silence again, for a time. He watches tree-lined fields flick by outside, vaguely nauseous. Unsettled. “My sister was about six years old when it happened. She was there. It – was hard on her. I went off to college, after. That’s why we haven’t talked.”

This is the truth, but also not the truth and he has no idea how to explain it any better than that. Not right now. Maybe not ever. He swallows hard and plows ahead. 

“I just – I don’t have a good track record with this stuff, you know? Well. I mean, with anything, really. With people I care about. My whole life, it’s been – just, all this pointless effort, and it all goes wrong no matter what I do. I can’t help anyone, can’t _protect_ them, so what’s the good in trying?” 

And then, finally, the crux of the thing.

“I never wanted to be a liability to you.”

“Is that what you think you are?”

The words are quiet. Otacon can’t look at him, can’t listen anymore. His hands in his lap are sweating, and he tightens his fingers, digs the nails into his palms until he feels them make crescent-dents in the skin. The pain is a welcome relief and he latches onto it like a lifeline.

When it becomes clear that he isn’t going to reply, Snake rubs his chin with one hand. There is no discernible change in his facial expression.

“Intel’s never a sure thing,” he says. “You know that as well as anybody. Too many variables. We’re not always going to make the right call.”

“I made that call! For my own reasons, and I – I didn’t even talk to you first. I sent you in there.”

“Last time I checked, this was a joint operation. You didn’t send me anywhere.”

“I really thought you were dead,” he whispers, desperate to make him understand. It feels like confessing something shameful. “At first. When I close my eyes now, that’s all I can see.”

This, at last, gets a reaction. Something flickers over Snake’s face like a shadow, there and gone too quickly to read. 

When he speaks again, his voice is softer.

“The mission was a success,” he points out. “Technically.”

“Technically.”

“We got the photos. They’re out.”

“We are on the run from multiple federal agencies. And probably literal death squads, if Ocelot has anything to say about it.” He hears the tremor in his voice and hates himself for it. “You could have drowned, or been blown to bits, or shot and left for dead. You think that’s a fair trade for some photos?”

 _Was it worth it_ , is what he really wants to ask. But that’s a different question, for another day. He doesn’t just mean the tanker.

He’s also afraid that maybe, deep down, he doesn’t want to know the answer.

Snake rolls down the window, flicks the remnant of his cigarette out into the humid wind. His eyes are fixed straight ahead, on the highway.

“There’s not much in life that’s fair. So if we’re using that as our benchmark, I’d say we’re already fucked.”

He turns up the radio, and Patsy Cline croons soulfully about willow trees and moonlit nights to fill the silence.

******

The outside of the facility looks exactly the way it had appeared in the artificially enhanced photos on his laptop, so thank God for that. 

Red brick and beige stone, tasteful. It’s set back from the road, with a little copse of trees at the far end of the lot that will shield their vehicle nicely.

The site is clean and well-kept, but not showy – no blooming dogwood trees, no landscaped daffodils in mulch. Prettier than a military installation, but only just. He doubts they do much work with the general public here, even if it’s nominally a privately-owned enterprise. The presence of at least one valuable “patient” of great interest to the US government is proof enough of that.

From their parked position, he can just make out the side entry door. The windows in the building are darkened, like something asleep. There is no movement.

Now or never.

Shielded by the trees and fast-darkening sky, he hops out and enters again through the rear cargo doors. Laptop up and running, external battery glowing green, modem beeping approvingly as it locks onto a connection. _Check._ It’s comforting, in its way. Smooth, routine. His focus narrows to the task at hand, fingers ready on the keys.

Snake readies the M9, checks the magazine one last time, and slips it into its holster. Otacon watches, and hesitates. 

“Be safe,” he says, finally. As if asking will make it so.

The corner of Snake’s mouth twitches up in a slight smile – a bitter, captive thing – and he slides noiselessly out of the van.


	4. Chapter 4

For Otacon, the initial approach to the entry point is the most nerve-wracking aspect of every mission.

The _insertion_ , Snake would say. But that seems like too technical a word for what is essentially walking into a building via a side door. It’s fitting for a nighttime HALO jump into enemy territory, or a clandestine approach to an island via submarine and scuba gear, or a fast-rope descent from a Black Hawk helicopter, but as Philanthropy doesn’t generally have the budget or support staff needed to pull off these types of fancy maneuvers in the private sector, their approach to most targets nowadays is decidedly more pedestrian.

So they park on a quiet side street, or in a dark field with the headlights off. Snake creeps down an alley and in through an unguarded window, or breaches a perimeter fence with wire cutters, and goes about his business. There’s very little fanfare.

Regardless – Otacon doesn’t like it, and never has.

He’s fully aware that this particular hang-up of his doesn’t make any sense. In terms of actual potential for disaster, the moment Snake makes his move on their objective is by far the most fraught; the break in cover required to plant the C4 or disconnect a valuable hard drive carries with it an unavoidable element of risk. Getting out again – the _extraction_ – is also not without its potential for complications, especially given that there may be alarms sounding and the crack of bullets in the air by this point if something’s gone wrong.

But the objective is just that – the objective, the _purpose_ , their reason for being there – and getting out is the downhill rush just before the finish line. By then, anyway, he’s working in flow; utterly absorbed, focused, with his fingers alive on the keyboard and Snake’s low voice in his ear, the two of them moving in tandem like parts of a well-oiled machine and it feels like everything he’s ever loved about his work.

Like sex, maybe, just a bit – although he’s never said so out loud.

What’s hard, are the last few moments before any of that happens. The precise transition point from peace and safety – or the illusion of it, at least – to something precarious, with everything at risk. Watching his partner slip out of the car and move away, into the dark. The deep breath before the plunge. 

They’re not invincible. He’s always known that, but knowing and believing are sometimes different things. 

And so it is, today.

He sits alone in the van, and nothing happens for a time. The sun dips lower behind the hills to the west. It’s afternoon on the cusp of evening, which is exactly what they want – harder to see out from inside, but early enough that there’s still movement and traffic on the nearby road.

The first rule of stealth operations is not to rush, and Snake is always patient. Scanning carefully for cameras or external alarms, watching the windows for signs of life. When he’s satisfied with what he sees, his voice comes in clear over the Codec.

“Ready when you are.”

“Got it. Go ahead and move.”

Otacon watches through what he can see of the windshield, tracking the silent shadow that moves toward the south side of the building. He taps a few keys in rapid succession, gets an acknowledging beep from the laptop.

“It’s open,” he says.

The figure slips easily inside, and the door clicks shut behind him.

******

From here, there’s only radar and the Codec to work by. Which makes things easier, in a way – neat and simple, the messy realities of blood and perspiration and men with guns reduced to a series of pixelated images on the computer screen. Otacon is in his element, here.

He watches the little white dot that represents his partner’s position move cautiously down the maintenance hallway and duck into what appears to be a utility closet. _Waiting. Observing_. All good. Take it slow. The red blip of another person – a guard, presumably – moves down the hall and back again as Otacon holds his breath. No movement again, for a time.

Snake’s voice over the radio: “Layout looks good, so far. No surprises.”

“That’s the idea. Stairwell should be up ahead on your left.”

The white dot moves again. Up the back stairs to the second floor landing; a careful pause, and up again. On the third floor there’s another guard, and Snake waits. His breathing sounds louder on the stairs than it had outside – harsh, _difficult_ , and Otacon doesn’t like it. Snake can run a six-minute mile and scarcely be winded.

A few minutes more, watching, and Snake speaks again in his ear. 

“Security’s not too tight, but they’re pros. Ex-military.” 

“Sidearm?”

“Yeah. Glock 23, looks like. They’re not fucking around.”

_Wonderful._

Snake has the M9 with its tranquilizer rounds, and that’s it. Which was an intentional choice – this needs to be an anonymous operation, no traces. In and out without being ID’d, and without anyone knowing what they came for. If they leave a trail of bullet-ridden bodies in their wake, it won’t take long for Ocelot and company to figure out what’s going on and their little deception won’t stand much scrutiny. 

Still.

“Be careful,” he says, because he can’t help it. 

Snake snorts at that, and doesn’t reply.

The security office – their first objective – is just down the hall to the right. Assuming the specs he has are correct, it’s an alcove adjacent to the larger rooms that house offices for the facility’s director and other executives. It’s an open space only loosely partitioned from the hall itself, which is good for slipping in and out without making noise, but not so good for privacy or concealment. 

By his count, the patrolling third-floor guard moves through every six minutes, give or take. Plenty of time. On the next pass, Snake shadows his footsteps along the wall and, _there_ – he’s in the office, at the computer, slotting the flash drive into place.

Outside in the van, his computer screen lights up like a Christmas tree. This is the part he enjoys, and it never fails to produce a giddy rush of delight – the internal workings of the network laid bare for his perusal, with all its metaphorical nooks and crannies. It’s a bit like being inside someone else’s brain; the sneaky thrill of voyeurism and the satisfaction of solving a difficult puzzle all rolled into one. He’s _useful_ when he does this, and he does it well. 

The filing system is straightforward enough – going by dates of arrival and cross-referencing that information with the timeline after Shadow Moses, it’s a simple process of elimination to determine which patient they need.

“Bay 16,” he says. “Should be on the left side of the room, last row near the wall. Give me a sec, here - I’ll get the security stuff offline and make sure you’ve got a clear path.” A few more keystrokes, and he’s in. Alarms, motion sensors, cameras. It’s a fairly sophisticated system, but nothing he hasn’t seen before. Simple enough to override the settings. 

He can also access live feed from the dozen-odd security cameras strategically placed throughout the building, which is an added bonus. Two guards on the first floor, standing near the conference room with cups of coffee. Second floor is mostly dark, with the patrol there passing by what’s marked on his diagram as a room for medical procedures. Routine. One of the third floor cameras is positioned such that the security alcove itself is visible at the edge of the frame, and he’s brought up short with a sudden, unexpected jolt of alarm at what he sees there.

_Shit._

Snake is still at the computer desk, as expected, but it’s his appearance that catches Otacon off guard. He’s not studying the screen (not that he has much to contribute to this particular aspect of the mission, but he’s sometimes curious in a detached sort of way to see Otacon’s handiwork unfolding in front of him), or scanning the hallway for potential threats. 

Instead, he’s doing something much more concerning – watching nothing at all. Leaning forward in the leather office chair with his head between his knees, still breathing hard, looking for all the world like someone who’s hanging onto consciousness by their fingernails.

“Snake?” He keeps his voice carefully neutral.

“I’m okay.”

“What’s up?”

“Just… lightheaded. Can’t see. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

“Need me to come in there?”

He’s only half-joking. Snake has the presence of mind to glance pointedly in the general direction of the camera in the hallway, and shoots it a look that’s half reproving, half amused before dropping his head back into his hands with a hard shake, as if to try and clear his vision. 

Otacon glances at the clock. Another two minutes, maybe. _Take your time._

And then, an unexpected wrinkle. The third-floor guard makes quick work of the two upper conference rooms in the east wing of the building and turns to head back early. Wants coffee, maybe, or a bathroom break. The goddamned _human factor_ is their biggest problem, every time.

There’s a certain amount of irony in that, perhaps, but he’s too anxious right now to fully appreciate it.

“Ah…” he swallows. “You’re about to have company, I think.”

Another five seconds. Ten. 

“Snake – ” The guard rounds the corner along the long row of executive offices and starts down the hall, and he allows some urgency to creep into his voice. “Get out of there.”

With obvious effort, Snake moves.

He’s up, but only for a moment. He staggers to the side, puts out a hand to the wall for support as his body folds over on itself. Sinks to one knee with his head down and even through the grainy black-and-white camera feed Otacon can see how hard he’s fighting not to black out completely.

_Shit, shit, shit._

The red blip is moving closer, now. A few more steps.

Otacon swears again under his breath, whispers a half-hearted prayer to whoever might be listening, and does the only thing he can think of.

The shrill bleating of the facility’s perimeter alarm system cuts through the evening air, knife-like, as all hell breaks loose on the security camera feeds. The first-floor guards abandon their coffee cups and move toward the lobby, where the indicator light for the front door motion sensor is now blinking insistently; the second-floor patrol heads for the stairs on the other end of the building, and – _thank God_ – the ominous red dot in the office hallway doubles back and away.

Snake’s head comes up sharply, still crouched, M9 in his hand.

In the space of a few frantic seconds, the little third-floor alcove is deserted.

“Relax, that’s me,” he says. “I mean, not _me_ – I’m still in the van, don’t worry! You know what I mean. Anyway, I’d say we’ve got about five minutes or so before they figure out there’s no one out front. Then maybe another, ah… three to five after that, before the police department shows up?”

“Good enough,” grunts Snake in his ear. “You said Bay 16, right?”

Back down the stairs, and it’s easy now. The blaring alarm covers the sound of the metal door ratcheting up on its chain, so no worries there, and Snake is out with a black body bag on a rolling gurney in exactly three minutes, fifty-two seconds. He heaves it onto the pavement with a sound like a heavy ice pick on snowy ground, and drags the gurney back inside. Another thirty seconds to get the storage room back in order and the door shut behind them, leaving no trace of their presence or any sign of what they came for, and it’s officially time to get out of Dodge.

Not a moment too soon, he thinks. Somewhere in the far-off distance, sirens are beginning to wail. 

Snake is beside him again, leaning heavily against the side of the van in an attempt to catch his breath. 

“That was smart,” he says. “I owe you one.”

“You take the laundry this week, and we’ll call it even.”

The bag on the pavement sits collecting frost, and Otacon regards it warily – black and shapeless, its vaguely elongated outline betraying only the barest hint of what it contains. Like the burial shroud of an arctic mummy. Of all the things they’ve recovered from various mission sites over the past two years, this takes the cake for being the absolute strangest. 

Seized with a kind of morbid curiosity in spite of himself, he crouches awkwardly on the ground, tugs at the zipper, and peeks inside.

_God._ The form in the body bag is nearly unrecognizable, frozen in an advanced state of decomposition. He wrinkles his nose involuntarily, even though there’s no odor – at least, not yet. The next few hours on the road should be a delight.

“Huh,” is all he can think to say. He stares. “Is it the right one, do you think? I mean – is it him?”

“How many arms does it have?” Snake asks darkly.

“Okay, okay. Yeah. Point taken.”

Between the two of them, they manage to wrestle their prize through the rear cargo doors. It’s an awkward fit, but with a hasty rearrangement of Otacon’s makeshift command center and a few hard shoves, everything is in. Doors latched and shut on the whole mess; out of sight, out of mind. They’ll sort the details out later.

Liquid thus safely squared away, he turns back to his partner – still doubled over by the open passenger door, dragging in reluctant lungfuls of the wet night air with one arm pressed tight against his stomach like it hurts to breathe. Otacon puts a hand on his back without thinking, leans closer to try and see his face, but Snake just shakes his head. 

“Drive,” he says. “I’m good.”

And he is, he always is. Otacon marvels at the consistent truth of this, half in-awe, as he clambers into the front seat and lets the van lurch forward.

******

Shoving Liquid’s body off the Staten Island side of the Verrazzano Bridge is an odd experience. Simpler than he’d thought it might be, in terms of logistics… but, _odd_. It feels a bit like killing him again. The corpse hits the water with a muffled splash, and they’re back on the road before he has much time to ponder the philosophical implications of what they’ve just done. 

Which is probably for the best, anyhow.

On their way back down the coast, they stop for gas and provisions at a crusted-over convenience store outside Wilmington. He ducks inside to grab the essentials while Snake waits in the parking lot – ramen noodles, canned soup, coffee. A six-pack of Blue Moon in bold defiance of the strict budgetary guidelines they’ve agreed on, because he just wants to stop _thinking_ for a few hours and God knows they’ve earned it tonight. 

At the cash register, on impulse, he throws in a cheap air freshener to hang from the rearview mirror. He doesn’t hold out much hope that this will salvage the interior of the van – it feels more like a symbolic gesture than anything else, spitting into a rainstorm, but he suddenly feels that his whole life has been built on those and it’s all he knows to do. 

Back in the driver’s seat, he stows the groceries and unwraps the little cardboard tree. It’s aggressively pine-scented. Snake raises his eyebrows in a silent, _really?_

“Hush,” he says. “It smells like dead things in here.”

They’re almost home, anyway. Another hour and they can both collapse onto the couch and call it a night. He’s ready to call it a week, honestly. A year. 

But at this point, he’ll settle for something hot to eat and eight hours undisturbed on a horizontal surface. Tomorrow’s problems can wait their turn.

******

It’s pushing two AM when they finally stumble through the front-door weeds and into the little safehouse. Chef Boyardee ravioli is the most substantial thing in the grocery bags, so he heats that up on the stove while Snake hauls in the rest of their gear from the van. The old-style TV picks up half a dozen channels with only a little snow, and he finds a rerun of Law and Order that provides the kind of bland, inoffensive background noise he’s looking for. Volume on low, barely audible. They eat in exhausted silence. 

Otacon finishes first, scraping up the last of the sauce and setting the bowl aside. He stretches his arms above his head with a yawn that morphs into a groan before he can stop it. His back pops, loud as a rifle shot in the quiet room.

“ _God_. Somehow, grad school failed to prepare me for the finer points of all the body dumping I’d be dealing with as part of my engineering career. It’s, ah…” He pauses, groping for the right word. “ _Messier_ , than I was hoping it would be. In every sense of the word.”

“Ivory tower bullshit,” growls Snake, squinting for dramatic effect. He watches Otacon for a moment, fiddling absently with the pop tab on his second can of beer. His eyes look tired. “Seems like their CQC program wasn’t much to write home about, either.”

“Well, we can’t all get our worldly education from a black ops immersion school, can we? MIT was the best I could manage.”

“Seems a hell of a lot less efficient.”

“You’re telling me. Six years start to finish, and half of that was grading lab reports for my advisor’s intro class.” He considers. “No PT, though. And nobody ever shot at us. So I guess that’s something.”

Snake huffs out a laugh at that, and it’s a rare enough thing that the room feels a little warmer. 

“I think this might be the most tired I’ve ever been, actually. In my entire life.” He feels hazy and punch-drunk; a heady combination of sleep deprivation and stress and a little bit of alcohol. The colors in the mildewed wallpaper take on a garish cast, uncomfortably bright. “And I once binge-watched all 112 episodes of Yu Yu Hakusho at a stretch without missing a single line of dialogue.”

“ _Aha_ ,” says Snake. “Well, I take it back. That’s one thing I was never trained for.”

They sit with their empty bowls for another long moment, both too overcome with inertia to move.

“So,” Otacon ventures, a little hopefully. “Want to paper-rock-scissors for the bed?”

“Fuck, no. I’ll behave if you will.” 

He heaves himself to his feet, finally, _reluctantly_ , takes both bowls and gives them a cursory rinse in the sink. When he comes back into the living room, Snake’s eyes are closed. He drops his head onto the back of the couch and adds, quietly: “I’ll take that pain pill now.”

They have a meager stash of stronger drugs, rarely used. Partly because they’re difficult to get – mostly through black market contacts in dirty alleyways, in small amounts – but mostly because Snake hates the way they make him feel. Even in the relative safety of whatever dingy hiding place they’re currently squatting in, far away from any outside threats, he doesn’t trust the loose-limbed lassitude and blunted reflexes that are the unavoidable price of relief.

He tries not to think about how much his partner must be hurting now, to ask for it.

Snake downs the little white tablet without further comment, chases it with the last of the beer. 

Between the two of them, they maneuver the trickiest of the suit fastenings open in the back and Otacon leaves him to it; unpacks the bare minimum that they’ll need for the next twenty-four hours, triple-checks the deadbolt on the front door and leaves the light on over the stove in the kitchen. The same mental checklist is easily adaptable to each new place they stay, and for that he’s grateful. It means he doesn’t have to think.

The bedroom is blessedly dark and quiet. The mattress is thin and the bedding smells musty, but it’s better than a sleeping bag on the floor and that’s all he’s really interested in tonight. He arranges himself as best he can on the far side of the bed, burrowing into the sheets with a sense of relief that’s almost alarming in its intensity. 

Safehouses with a shortage of sleeping space are a regular feature of their existence, and they’ve made do with a single mattress on more than one occasion in the past – for this, like everything else, they have a routine. Snake sleeps facing the door with a handgun in easy reach (because _of course_ he does), and Otacon lays on his back or faces out in the opposite direction, with his knees drawn up and hands tucked under the pillow. 

Snake sometimes grouses at him for stealing more than his fair share of the covers when he wakes up on cold mornings with the blankets cocooned in an impenetrable layer of insulation around his body, but otherwise it’s generally an acceptable arrangement for them both. Comfortable, even – at least from his perspective. He’s never been _frightened_ of the dark, exactly, or of monsters in the trees, but their work has taught him the hard way that bad things can happen at any time. It’s not paranoia if there really is a shadowy organization out there that wants you dead. 

With a legendary super soldier snoring at his back, he feels safe. Which is only natural. If there are any other reasons that he doesn’t mind sharing a bed with Snake from time to time, he has steadfastly refused to examine them too closely.

Tonight, without quite understanding why, he doesn’t curl up into his usual position. His mind is empty; drifting. Blank. He lies on his side facing Snake, eyes open, watching the steady rise and fall of his back in the muted nighttime half-light filtering in weakly through the window. It saturates the colors in the little room; the curtains and carpet and wallpaper into washed-out black and white until it all blends together, a suffocating gray-scale blur without his glasses. 

There is only what he can see in front of his face, close enough to touch. Snake asleep, or nearly. The suit draped over the bedside chair where he’d left it, an oddly menacing shape in the moonlight; an angry, ugly purplish-blue. Blue-gray, blue-black. Blue like the Hudson River, like cold fingertips exposed to the air. Deoxygenated. Dead.

_No._

They have the photos and they’re _fine_ , and that’s what matters.

He reaches out, as if in a trance. Presses his palm to the smooth skin just below Snake’s shoulder, fingers lightly tracing the outline of the bruising there. Stroking, feather-light. Gentle.

His partner stiffens briefly in surprise, glancing back at him before returning his head to the pillow, facing away. His shoulders relax.

Otacon feels his face flush, snatches his hand away as though he’s been burned.

_For God’s sake, Hal. Get a grip._

“Sorry.”

Snake’s voice rumbles back from the other side of the bed, drowsy. 

“S’okay.” A pause. Then, low and soft, like an afterthought. “You don’t have to stop.”

For a moment, he’s so floored by this that he thinks he must have misheard. But, no – Snake doesn’t move away, keeps perfectly still on the bed beside him with the sheet down around his hips and his breathing slow and even. 

And _oh_ , this is dangerous. He knows it, feels it in his chest – trembling on a knife’s edge. He should apologize again, roll over and go to sleep. It’s not too late. They’ll both feel better in the morning, won’t they? More like themselves. Back to their accustomed roles. Safe. Familiar. 

But he’s come this far, and he can’t go back. He could never put that part of him entirely aside, from the first time Snake came limping back to the first low-rent apartment they ever shared with the files they needed and something feral, _deadly_ , glittering in his eyes all the way up to now. A hot sticky night in the middle of nowhere, with a leaky roof in the living room and the scream of cicadas outside the window. Both of them breathing softly in the dark, exhausted and raw. 

He’s helpless in the face of what he’s always wanted so badly, with permission freely offered, and his hand creeps forward again of its own volition. This time, Snake doesn’t startle at his touch. He’s drawn back to the mottled flesh still visible on the bare skin of his back; painful, accusing. _It’ll heal_ , his partner had said. And it will, of course it will. 

He lays his hand over it anyway, smoothing the edges with his thumb as if it were an ink spot he could blend away; colors on a page, soft gray like everything else. Like a paint brush underwater, dipped in black. Then up through the tangled hair, stiff with dried sweat, to stroke careful fingers over the knot at the base of his skull where he knows it’s still sore. 

Beneath his hand, Snake makes a quiet sound; a deeper breath and a soft, hitching exhalation, barely perceptible. 

“Okay?” he whispers. He isn’t sure what he’s asking. 

“No one’s ever… done that. Touched me, like that.”

“Like what?”

There’s a pause that feels like forever, like all the time since Alaska condensed, and he thinks at first that Snake isn’t going to answer.

“Been hurt a lot, in the field. It happens.” He’s silent for another long moment. “Naomi Hunter, even Master. I was always, just – a tool that needed fixing. Patch me up so I can work.”

He shifts a little, his words muffled by the pillow.

“Just. It feels good.”

He lies there listening, with his hand in Snake’s hair and his heartbeat tingling in his fingertips until long after they’ve both fallen quiet.

That night, he sleeps and doesn’t dream.


	5. Chapter 5

He thinks at first that dogs are barking, somewhere.

In the first months after Shadow Moses, when they were still in the cabin on the godforsaken Alaskan tundra hashing out the details of the fledgling organization that would become the focus of their lives together, this was how he had awakened most mornings. To pale, half-hearted sunshine slanting in through a dusty window and a kennel full of huskies setting up a chorus for their breakfast. 

He was a night owl and always had been, even as a guest in someone else’s home; but Snake was up before dawn, nearly always, to feed the dogs. Otacon found this habit oddly endearing, although his new roommate had gruffly insisted that the arrangement was purely practical and had nothing at all to do with the irresistible force exerted by fifty-odd eager faces who watched for him every morning to come stomping across the snow with a bag of kibble slung over his shoulder. 

Rain or shine, no matter what other chores needed doing that day or how apparently urgent they were, the dogs ate first. The result was that the huskies could reliably predict the sunrise with the unshakeable precision of an atomic clock. 

And so it went. 

Farm people in the continental U.S. had roosters. The famous Solid Snake had sled dogs – and honestly, it didn’t seem any more ridiculous than any of the other recent twists in Otacon’s life at that point. He’d just finished accidentally building a nuclear weapon for a cohort of terrorists, so he didn’t feel qualified to judge anyone else for their eccentricities.

This morning, he’s halfway to reaching for the fleece slippers he used to keep beside the pull-out sofa for his bare feet in the snowy cold when the memory dissolves along with the last clinging remnants of sleep. His head clears, and reality comes flooding back.

Delaware, in August. No slippers needed.

The bed beside him is empty. It’s heading on towards mid-morning if the sky outside is any indication, so that’s not a surprise; he’s the only half of this partnership that ever sleeps past seven. He hears the sound again, louder – something muffled, repetitive, short and sharp – and heads for the bedroom door with a vague sense of unease niggling at the back of his mind. 

_Coughing_.

There are no dogs, today.

Down the little hallway to the bathroom door, mostly shut. He nudges it open with one hand, tentative at first, to find his partner kneeling on the floor beside the toilet. 

He looks awful – glassy-eyed and tired, cheeks flushed, dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a thin T-shirt that are doing nothing to hide the alarming pallor of his skin. It’s such an entirely unexpected sight that for the space of several long seconds, Otacon simply stands in the doorway and stares at him, blinking. 

Snake breaks the silence first.

“If you need to take a piss, you’re gonna have to give me a minute.” His voice is rougher than usual and he swallows hard when he’s done, as if it hurts to talk.

“What are you doing in here?”

“Woke up like this.” He turns his head, spits something into the toilet. “Feel like shit. Didn’t want to wake you up.”

“Ah. Of course.” Otacon blinks some more, still taking in the scene. “Well, you’ve got it handled, obviously. I’ll just go back to bed. Why would I need to know if you’re coughing your lungs up and running a fever?”

He tries for a light tone – exasperated, maybe, or drily sarcastic – but he’s angry about this for some reason, and the intensity of it catches him off-guard. Snake hears it too; fixes him with a look he can’t identify, like he’s trying to puzzle something out. He feels suddenly self-conscious. Exposed. 

Which doesn’t make any sense and he knows it, because he’s not the one sitting in a pitiful half-dressed heap on the bathroom floor.

Snake opens his mouth to defend himself, or perhaps to ask him what the hell his problem is, but his body won’t cooperate – he’s bent over again before he can speak, with his lungs and throat struggling over a wet, hacking spasm that seems to go on for ages; gasping for breath with his eyes squeezed shut and one hand clawing involuntarily at his chest like he’s trying to tear it open. 

It’s worse than yesterday, or the day before. A lot worse. 

He can see it on Snake’s face – that breathless feeling, like drowning all over again – and for the first time since that night alone on the river, screaming his partner’s name into the dark, he feels afraid.

The glare of the overhead light leaves nothing to the imagination. He steps inside and shuts the door behind him – which is stupid, because there’s no one else here and it doesn’t matter, but it’s instinctive and he can’t help it. A little bit of normalcy. Gropes in the bathroom cupboard for a washcloth, wets it in the sink and offers it to Snake, who takes it and wipes his face. 

“You’re not okay, Dave,” he says, with a calm he doesn’t feel. “This isn’t just… normal stuff. Being tired and sore. it’s more than we can handle here, by ourselves. Let me call someone. A doctor, or – I don’t know. _Something._ ”

He’s prepared to argue for it, but Snake doesn’t move – sits with his forehead still resting on the edge of the toilet seat, shivering. “Yeah,” he says, finally. “Okay.”

Okay.

He hesitates, then takes the wet cloth from Snake’s hand and presses it carefully against the back of his neck – feels the tension in his shoulders ease, just a bit.

“Bed’s all yours, if you want it,” he says, and steps out before he can embarrass himself further. 

******

There’s only one person he can think to contact. 

An emergency room is out of the question, since that would require identification and insurance cards and other things they can’t provide without being immediately carted off to prison. _Or worse._ But he’s ready to admit that they need professional help – someone who can do a proper exam, at least, and see what can be done without a hospital. Someone discreet, who doesn’t care what they’re up to and won’t ask prying questions.

His contacts in the espionage community are sadly limited, given his mostly-civilian background, so he doesn’t know anyone offhand in this part of the country who fits the bill. But – with a bit of luck – Philanthropy _does_ know someone who might.

He rummages in the bottom of his duffel bag for one of the cheap burner phones they keep on hand, punches in a secure number, and waits.

A heavily accented Ukrainian voice answers on the fourth ring.

“ _Nastasha_ ,” he says, and stops. For a moment, he’s so relieved she picked up that his mind goes blank. 

There’s a pause, presumably while she places the voice. 

“Boys,” she says at last, drawing out the word. It’s always been her habit to refer to Snake and himself as a single unit, regardless of which one she’s talking to. 

She waits again for him to speak, but he doesn’t.

“I saw what happened, in New York. On the news.” Another pause. “You are both safe, I hope?”

“Ah,” he says. “Well. That’s… kind of what I’m calling about, actually. We need a favor. If you can help us, I mean. I know you were based in D.C. for a while, right? We thought – well, I thought – you might have some contacts here, still.”

He’s rambling, nervous. _Stop it, Hal_. _Focus._ He explains the details of their situation as best he can, haltingly, and lapses into silence again. 

Nastasha _tsks_ at his request, smoothly competent as always.

“I’ve not been in Washington for a long time. But, yes – I have someone who could help, I think. Give me a few hours, and tell me where to send him.”

******

The man who walks into the house that afternoon is all business, which suits Otacon just fine.

They don’t know his name, and he doesn’t know theirs – Snake had been insistent about this and Nastasha had agreed, because it’s the safest bet for everyone involved. Plausible deniability. 

They have her word that he’s a physician for private hire, accustomed to moving in shady circles and willing to work with anyone from foreign nationals to mafia dons for the right price, and that’s all they need to know. They trust her professional judgment, and she trusts him – both his expertise, and his discretion. 

It’s good enough. It has to be, really, since she’s footing the bill and it’s this or nothing. 

Middle-aged and balding, he looks like for all the world like the sort of person you might go golfing with if you were a bank director or a Fortune 500 CEO. Otacon wasn’t sure what he had expected, exactly - someone rather more exotic and dangerous, perhaps, like a sort of medical James Bond – but the sheer mundanity of this man in his khaki pants and polo shirt makes him breathe just a bit easier about the whole thing. 

He carries a bag with a hefty shoulder strap that looks like it could hold fishing tackle or camping gear rather than anything that overtly betrays his profession, and nods brusquely at both of them as walks past Otacon into the living room. Snake, sitting on the couch in jeans and a nondescript dark T-shirt that gives no hint of any identifying interests or features, regards him warily.

The man has been briefed by Nastasha, presumably, and knows the pertinent details of his patient’s recent history. Whether he’s drawn any conclusions about the possible connection between two men fitting their description holed up in the Delaware countryside and the debacle that’s been all over the news, or recognizes Snake’s face, is anyone’s guess – but if so, he shows no particular curiosity about it, which Otacon supposes is about as much as they can hope for.

At his gesture, Otacon hauls the little kitchen chair in for him to sit on. He pulls it right up next to the couch, across from Snake, who answers his questions with a bare minimum of extraneous detail.

Shortness of breath? Yes. 

Chest pain? Yes.

Dizzy? A little, when he tries to stand up.

He doesn’t take notes, or make any pretense of keeping records – just nods, expressionless, taking everything in. When he’s satisfied with what he’s heard, he unzips the bag and pulls out a stethoscope and a few other odds and ends, and lays them out on the coffee table beside him with an air of brisk efficiency. “Right, then,” he says to Snake. “Shirt off, and let’s have a look.” 

Over his shoulder, to Otacon, he adds: “Mind giving us a minute, please?”

“He stays,” says Snake flatly, before Otacon can formulate a response one way or the other. 

The doctor shrugs, as if it makes no real difference to him either way.

Watching Snake strip down and submit quietly to being touched and prodded by this stranger feels odd, _uncomfortable_ somehow, for reasons he can’t quite pin down, and he finds himself hovering closer to the couch than might be strictly necessary. The doctor peers at the digital reading on his thermometer and frowns. Seats the stethoscope in his ears, taps experimentally on Snake’s chest and back with his fingers; listens to him breathe, and frowns some more. 

The deep breaths set Snake to coughing, and for a horrible ten seconds or so he can’t stop – curled forward over his knees, shaking with the force of it, pain etched across his features as he struggles to sit up again. It leaves him white-faced and trembling, sagging back against the sofa cushions with his eyes shut tight while the doctor watches impassively, and Otacon fights the entirely illogical urge to step between them and declare the visit finished. 

He settles for clearing his throat, raising his eyebrows in what he hopes is a pointed look. 

“So?”

“He needs antibiotics,” the doctor says, matter-of-fact. He turns away from Snake and begins packing up his things, slotting the instruments back into their places as he talks. “Well. Really, he needs to be in a hospital for oxygen support and closer monitoring because his lungs sound like garbage, but – I’m told there are reasons he’s not. So I suppose that’s up to the two of you.”

He unzips a separate compartment on the side of the bag and removes a glass vial and syringe, along with a sheaf of pills in a blister pack and a shaded prescription bottle containing a handful of white, oval-shaped tablets. Otacon peers at them over his shoulder, scrutinizing the words he can make out on the packaging. Sulbactam/ampicillin. Amoxicillin/clavulanic acid. The tablets – levofloxacin, maybe?

In calm, unhurried silence, the doctor handles the tools of his trade with the deft skill of a professional – peels the syringe from its plastic casing, draws a carefully measured amount of sterile water from a larger bottle in the bag, dilutes the powder in the vial and shakes it with a few expert flicks of his wrist. 

“I can give an injectable loading dose to help jump start things and get adequate serum levels quickly. Start the orals now, as well. Once a day, twice a day.” He indicates the prescription bottle and blister pack, in turn. “Otherwise, it’s the usual routine – drink plenty of fluids. Rest. Et cetera.”

The vial sufficiently mixed, he uncaps a fresh syringe and pierces the thin rubber membrane, holding the bottle upside down to draw up the drug.

Snake sits very still, watching. His eyes are fixed on the needle. 

“Leave the meds,” he says, abruptly. “We’ll manage.”

The doctor stops. He raises his eyebrows, surprised. “It needs to go intravenously.”

“That’s fine.”

“Suit yourself.”

He withdraws the needle, caps the syringe, and places it on the coffee table along with the glass vial, beside the pills. _And why not?_ He collects his fee either way, Otacon supposes. They’ve gotten an assessment, and his professional opinion. Beyond that, the whole affair is none of his concern.

Snake has nothing more to say on this point, evidently, but Otacon musters a feeble “thanks” as the doctor hefts his bag and takes his leave. 

At the door, he addresses himself to Otacon one last time.

“Here’s what I can tell you. Bacterial pneumonia isn’t uncommon after a near-drowning incident, but it can be a nasty thing. Watch the fever. Anything above 104 is dangerous – seizures, neurologic abnormalities, brain damage. If you can’t keep his temperature down, you really have no choice but to take him in.” Hand on the doorknob, now. “That’s the best I can do, I’m afraid. Best of luck to you both.”

The door shuts behind him with an air of finality, and they’re alone again in the little threadbare living room.

Otacon engages the lock and slides the deadbolt back into place, then turns back to Snake, who hasn’t moved from his position on the couch. He’s rubbing absently at the crook of his left arm like he doesn’t realize he’s doing it, back and forth over the crease just inside the elbow. Watching him expectantly.

“Okay,” says Otacon. “Want to tell me what that was all about?”

“You’ve injected me before.”

“Yeah, but – just nanomachines. I mean, he’s a doctor. Like, an actual _medical_ doctor. His technique is probably a lot better than mine.”

“Don’t care,” Snake says shortly. “I want it to be you.” 

He understands, then, and stops talking. Snake has his reasons. Dr. Hunter had made sure of that.

He adjusts the angle of the chair so he can reach both Snake and the table without undue difficulty. Picks up the vial, draws the liquid carefully into the syringe and flicks out the tiny air bubbles that gather near the hub. _Easy_. From there, it’s almost indistinguishable from their normal routine – the rubber tourniquet, the alcohol wipe. The quick flash of red in the syringe.

There’s an element of ritual to this that he suspects they both find grounding, in its way. Snake stares straight ahead, his breathing slow and controlled while Otacon works. Relaxes when he feels the drug go in, because that means it’s almost over.

Otacon withdraws the needle – smoothly, straight back so it doesn’t hurt – and presses his thumb over the tiny pinprick. Snake’s arm feels warm and solid under his hands. Too warm. 

“See?” says Snake. “I keep telling you. The Ph.D. is good enough for me.”

“I suspect the Ph.D. is pretty much irrelevant, for me to jab holes in your arm. But thanks for the vote of confidence, anyway.” 

He checks the injection site one last time before letting go, rubs away the tiny drop of blood while Snake watches his hand. There’s a blush creeping up into his cheeks; he can feel it. He gathers up the discarded bottle and bits of plastic packaging for the trash, suddenly grateful for a reason to get up and move away.

Grabbing a glass from the kitchen, he fills it in the sink. Sets it on the coffee table along with the bottle of ibuprofen (which will need replacing soon, he notes ruefully) and both sets of oral antibiotics. Snake downs the pills with a gulp of water while he watches. Irrationally, he’s hoping already for some kind of improvement, wants things to be better because they have a plan now, they’re _doing_ something – but of course it doesn’t work that way. 

Against his better judgment, he steps close to the sofa again; close enough to touch, almost, as he takes the half-empty glass from Snake’s hand. His partner scoots forward to get up, and for the space of a few precious seconds – before he has time to fully register what’s happening – leans his forehead against Otacon’s leg as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

His hand drops down, unbidden, to rest lightly on the top of Snake’s head.

He opens his mouth on some sort of insipid platitude – _you’ll feel better soon_ ; _give the meds some time to work_ – but he can’t say any of these things with straight face, and anyway it feels like convincing himself, more than his partner, who looks more thoroughly miserable at the moment than Otacon has ever seen him.

What he settles for instead, is arguably just as bad.

“I’m right here,” he says, stupidly. Softly.

Snake just grunts, eyes closed.

“Now for God’s sake,” he adds, with his voice still embarrassingly gentle because he can’t _stop_ , for some ungodly reason. “Go lay down, okay? I need to do some follow-up on our little raid last night, and I can’t concentrate if you’re sitting in here half-dead.” 

Snake pads down the hall to the bedroom without further argument.

He doesn’t know whether or not to feel relieved.

******

He _does_ have work to do – that much is true.

A quick check of the Alexandria police department’s online report database shows a duty log entry of their response to an alarm system malfunction last night at Cryocor Industries. No evidence of a break-in, nothing unusual found at the scene. 

So that’s something, at least.

He also makes a routine circuit of the usual dark web message boards that have been a thorn in their side before – conspiracy theorists who think they’re smarter than they are, putting together puzzle pieces that he and Snake would just as soon keep out of the public eye. Their track record for accuracy is spotty at best, but even a broken clock is right twice a day and if they’re onto something hot, Otacon wants to know. 

Today, there’s not much to see. The tanker explosion is a topic of conversation, but the theories are wide-ranging and varied, covering the spectrum from plausible to outlandish to batshit crazy with at least half a dozen different viewpoints represented. Some commenters are buying the environmental terrorism angle, at least on the face of it, while others are arguing that the U.S. military staged the entire thing as a cover for something more nefarious. 

For those who believe the news of Philanthropy’s involvement, he and Snake are variously believed to be dead, working in cahoots with the Russian government, or on the run in Canada or South America or Australia like a modern-day Butch and Sundance. Their current digs feel almost laughably pedestrian in comparison, but in many ways, that’s precisely the point.

Nothing close enough to make him nervous. Their luck is holding, for now – at least with respect to being tracked down and taken into custody. This is how he occupies his time, but regardless of what he’d asserted, to claim he was giving his full attention to the task would be self-delusion of the most transparent kind.

His partner is sick, and he doesn’t know what else to do.

So every hour, on the hour, he paces back to the bedroom for a status check. Makes sure Snake is still breathing, and hopes vainly every time for some hint that things are heading in the right direction.

He brings water, which mostly sits untouched on the nightstand, and more Advil when it’s time to re-dose. He frowns down at their own thermometer, in turn. He’d insisted on splurging for one of the fancy digital models that reads from the ear when they had initially stocked the first aid kit – _because it’s the 21 st century, Snake, and everyone hates the oral kind_ – and he’s never been more grateful for it than now. He suspects his partner feels the same, although he still growls irritably at the thing every time it beeps, so it’s hard to say for certain.

He wets dish towels in the kitchen sink, and brings them in to lay over Snake’s forehead and against his neck. If this helps at all, he can’t tell – but it can’t hurt, and it’s _something_ , so he keeps doing it anyway.

******

As the afternoon wears on into evening, his anxiety level increases. 

The temperature readings are stubbornly higher each time, Snake’s breathing still sounds like absolute shit, and – perhaps most troublingly – he seems less aware of his surroundings now than he had earlier in the day. Characteristically terse answers to Otacon’s questions had given way to a dazed sort of blinking, which had in turn devolved into a terrifying lack of any conscious response at all.

Around 9 pm, he finds his partner muttering in Russian or Arabic or some other tongue that Otacon has never heard before, twitching restlessly on top of the sheets, and he finds this so disconcerting that he can’t leave the bedroom again. He grabs his laptop and sets himself up a portable little nest on the other side of the bed, and pretends to work. As if by being a few feet away, physically present, he can bring the fever down through sheer force of will.

Predictably, the only real effect this has is to put the seriousness of the situation into stark relief. 

And so a little before midnight, in something approaching a blind panic, he opts for a radical change in strategy.

There’s no ice in the house. The a/c (such as it is) is already doing its best, and wet towels aren’t enough to make any kind of useful difference. But water is a highly effective conductor of heat, if there’s enough of it… and there might be only one other thing he can try, short of calling an ambulance and taking the inevitable fallout as it comes.

He flicks the light on in the bathroom and opens the tap in the tub. 

Back in the bedroom, he approaches the bed.

“Snake?” No response. He initially reaches for his partner’s shoulder to give a careful shake, then decides _the hell with it_ , and gives in to the humiliating impulse to smooth sweat-damp strands of hair back from his face. Snake’s eyelids twitch at the touch, but nothing else. “Hey. Can you hear me?”

His lips move on something slurred, indistinct. If it’s English, Otacon can’t swear to it.

“Gonna try something else, okay? Need to you to help me out a little.”

He pulls Snake’s arm around his neck and hauls him up into a sitting position, grunting with effort, then steels himself to try and stand. He’s relieved to find that Snake isn’t _unconscious_ – just unaware, lost in fever dreams; too sick to process what’s going on around him in any kind of realistic way. It’s a distinction that hadn’t seemed to matter much until now, but he’s profoundly grateful at that the very least, he can still manage to move his legs and support himself with some assistance.

They lurch down the hall, lopsided. 

In the bathroom, he flips the toilet lid closed with his foot and eases Snake down onto it. His partner slouches forward precariously, blinking at the tile floor in confusion, while he pants against the wall and plots his next move.

This is as far as he’d gotten, when the idea had struck, and for a moment he feels utterly defeated by the overwhelming logistical difficulty of what to do next.

All right, then. One thing at a time.

He maneuvers Snake’s sweatpants down his legs and off, but leaves the rest. It’s easier, and wet clothes are the least of their concerns right now. Then, after a moment’s further thought, he wriggles out of his own jeans as well. His face is burning red again for some reason. They’ve seen each other in various states of undress countless times by this point, so there’s nothing new in that – but this particular situation is uncharted territory for them both.

Otacon shuts off the tap, dips a hand in to check the temperature, and hauls his partner up again.

He’s acutely aware that this might be the most uncomfortable thing he’s ever done.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Snake groans, as he feels the water creeping up around his legs. It’s the first coherent thing he’s said in hours.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry.”

He lowers them both down as carefully as he can; bending his knees, lower back twinging in protest, straining under their combined weight. He braces one elbow clumsily on the edge of the tub and twists his body, folding into the narrow space with his knees on either side of Snake’s hips and finally – _finally_ – they’re in.

The water isn’t overly cold, by any means – barely room-temperature cool, just enough to feel refreshing, if anything, in the stuffy little bathroom with his partner’s sweat soaking through both their T-shirts and his body heat pressed close against Otacon’s chest.

But for Snake, it’s like an ice bath and he knows it, chest squeezing tight with irrational guilt; the fever plays tricks on his nerves. It hurts, like frostbite on waxy skin. He’s disoriented and weak and he can’t make his limbs work properly, can’t move, can’t _breathe_ , fighting Otacon’s grip around his waist – the way it had felt that night on the river, the way it had been for E.E., and Otacon does what he couldn’t do then; tightens his hold on the trembling body in his arms, buries his face in the crook of Snake’s shoulder, and allows the tears to come.

He thinks about the dogs, again, apropos of nothing. _Why now?_

Snake’s working dogs, and the way his voice was always soft and gravelly when he spoke to them. The ones he had cared for at Shadow Moses, keening for Sniper Wolf while she lay still and cold in the snow. He and his sister had never had a dog of their own, as children, but he thinks E.E. would have loved one.

His glasses are fogging, digging into the bridge of his nose and threatening to fall off entirely, but he can’t bring himself to care. The world outside their little hideaway fades to nothing, hazy and scarcely real, until he could swear that this is all there’s ever been – the hard ceramic surface of the tub against his back, the salty-hot smell of Snake’s skin, and the terrifying heat radiating from his neck and face. 

His partner is quiet now, head lolling back to rest heavy on Otacon’s shoulder. 

_If you love someone, you have to be able to protect them._

There is such a sense of irony in this, now, that he’s seized with a vaguely hysterical impulse to laugh, but it comes out as another sob instead, his whole body heaving with it like a child. He hasn’t cried this way in years. Not since he left home.

There’s not much in life that he loves, anymore. Less than he’d once thought. _And maybe_ , he thinks bitterly, _that’s for the best after all_.

He sits with the water soaking through his shirt, holding everything in his arms that still matters, and watches the night through the tiny bathroom window.

Waits for the sky to lighten.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's porn in this one, y'all. Note the updated rating.

The fever breaks – if that’s a thing that can be quantified in such a precise, dramatic fashion; like a scene from Little House on the Prairie – a little while before dawn.

He’d fallen asleep at some point, evidently, with his head braced sideways against the rear wall of the tub. The chill of the water has finally set in for him now, too. His toes are shriveled like raisins, rough and wrinkled where he can still feel them, and he drifts up toward consciousness on a vague notion of wanting to be warm and dry before he can quite recall why he isn’t.

There’s movement then, against the front of his body. Someone coughs a little; something solid against his chest, his legs, and he blinks fully awake to see his partner’s face in profile – not twelve inches from his own, taking in the situation with an air of puzzlement that would have been amusing if Otacon weren’t so absurdly grateful to see him awake. 

Snake opens his mouth; closes it again. Says, finally: “It’s fucking cold in here.” 

He doesn’t sound angry, or upset, or even embarrassed. Just perplexed. 

“I, uh… yeah. It is, kind of. Sorry about that.” 

They sit, regarding each other warily. Otacon reaches up to adjust his glasses on his nose; a reflexive movement. A trickle of water dribbles slowly off his elbow, loud in the quiet room.

“So,” says Snake, and grimaces – coughs again to clear his throat. “I’d ask, but...”

“Well, ah – you know. There’s not much to tell.” He’s nervous again now, tongue-tied and stammering with Snake _looking_ at him like that, so he defaults to what’s comfortable for them both. As comfortable as anything can be, with both of them soaked to the skin and sandwiched together in a bathtub designed for one. “Pretty uneventful night, in the grand scheme of things. Change of scenery from the bedroom, right?” He pauses, swallows hard. “You were maybe, uh… a little too out of it to remember everything. That’s all.”

Snake grunts at that, since it’s clearly the understatement of the year, but doesn’t challenge his account any further. He does, however, give Otacon’s shoulder a firm, deliberate squeeze before levering himself upright and out of the tub with only a little difficulty.

Otacon’s legs are half-asleep from the cramped position, and he stretches them gingerly to get rid of the pins-and-needles tingling; rolls his head from side to side in an attempt to alleviate the painful crick in his neck. And then – _oh, God_. As soon as he moves, it becomes immediately clear that spending the past few hours with his partner’s warm, hard body pressed directly against his groin in a confined space has had an effect.

He considers just sitting in the tub with his knees drawn up until the coast is clear, but Snake apparently sees no reason to wander around the house dripping water everywhere – he simply turns his back and starts the process of peeling off his wet clothes and _dammit_ , that’s not going to help the situation at all.

There’s nothing else for it, so he clambers awkwardly out of the water. 

Once he’s on his feet, his erection is absolutely impossible to miss – the wet boxer shorts are clinging skin-tight to everything, and trying to keep his hands strategically placed to cover it up is only making things worse. Snake glances at him as he reaches for a towel, takes everything in without a word, and calmly goes on with what he’s doing. 

He’s torn between wishing his partner would say something, anything at all to break the tension – _is that a ridiculously expensive digital aural thermometer in your shorts, or are you just glad to see me?_ \- and being absurdly relieved that he doesn’t. It’s hard to imagine how it could possibly make things any worse, but God knows he’s been wrong before and his judgment has been shit lately. 

About literally everything.

“I’m, uh – glad you’re feeling better,” he says, doing his best to avert his eyes as Snake dries himself briskly. If the tiled bathroom floor were to open up and swallow him right now, he wouldn’t object. “Take your time in here. I’m just going to, um.” _What, exactly? Does it even matter?_ “Well… take your time.” 

And with that, he flees, pulling the door resolutely shut behind him.

******

The next day, and the day after that, pass in a quiet blur of regular activity.

It ought to come as an unmitigated relief. A return to their normal routine, or something like it. Another crisis averted. The world set back on its axis; cheap Chinese in the microwave, and their ears back to the ground for signs of trouble. Or _his_ ear, at least. Snake is still recuperating, and intel has always been his specialty anyway.

But for some reason, he can’t relax – doesn’t trust the fragile peace, either in the world at large that’s ostensibly still hunting them down, or inside their drab little bungalow. And maybe it doesn’t matter. He settles back into his usual topsy-turvy work schedule, sitting glued to his computer screen until the wee hours of the morning with a half-drunk can of Red Bull and a bowl of ramen noodles going cold, listening to the quiet dark in the house around him.

He’s also taken to sleeping on the couch, on the pretext of giving Snake the space he needs to rest and not wanting to disturb him with the erratic hours he keeps. “Back to normal” means a lot of things, and somewhere underneath the shifting midnight silence and the itchy spare blanket that smells like old books, he can’t help but feel a curious sense of loss.

For his part, Snake takes his meds and eats on a semi-regular schedule. He lays in bed re-reading a novel unearthed from the depths of his bag, wanders the property outside when he starts to get stir-crazy, and patches the leak in the living room ceiling one afternoon over Otacon’s disapproving frown. 

All of which is a good thing. Truly, it is.

It feels like _home_ again, as much as any place ever does – because Otacon had long ago accepted the notion that home is an idea, a concept; a set of circumstances and the right person to share them with rather than a particular location on the map – and honestly, he’s missed it. The far-off fading buzz of adrenaline, and the illusion of something safe. The companionable clink of coffee mugs on the kitchen counter.

He watches the ten o’clock news on the couch every night with his dinner, parsing the headlines and sound bites for anything that might be relevant – and on the third day out, the story hits. 

_About time_. 

At long last, the decomposing remains of terrorist leader Solid Snake have been dragged from the harbor and positively identified through DNA analysis. The serious-faced DHS spokesman is pleased to be able to call off the search, and devote all available resources to cleanup and recovery efforts. There is talk already of a dedicated offshore decontamination facility to manage the massive amounts of crude oil and other toxins left in the wake of this unprecedented environmental disaster, which is such bullshit that Otacon physically rolls his eyes even though there’s no one around to see. 

Construction is slated to begin later this year.

It’s an odd move – seems significant, somehow, and he makes a mental note to do some digging. 

Before he can pursue that train of thought too much further, the thump of a closing cupboard door intrudes. He cranes his head over the back of the couch as Snake comes wandering in from the kitchen with a glass of water and some kind of god-awful oat bran bar, tearing the wrapper with his teeth. 

“Oh, hey!” Otacon gestures at the television. “Good news. It looks like you’ve officially shuffled off this mortal coil.”

“Well, thank God for that. I was starting to wonder.”

Snake sinks down onto the sofa beside him like it’s any other night, propping one sock-covered foot on the coffee table. Holds up his glass, lazily, and Otacon clinks his against it. He looks better – really, honestly _better_ – for the first time since New York, and something begins to unknot itself in Otacon’s chest. 

They sit in easy silence for a time. On TV, the news anchor is interviewing a forensic pathologist about the science of genetic testing. There are the photos of Snake, again. No cause of death could be established due to the poor condition of the body, but there’s no doubt about the ID. 

The flickering light from the screen plays over Snake’s face, taking in the in-depth analysis of his own death without any apparent emotion. He finishes the cereal bar, drinks. There’s something surreal about it.

Otacon clears his throat.

“It feels weird, huh? Makes it hard not to think about… well. You know.” 

He studies the glass in his hand, chipping at a tiny scratch near the lip with his fingernail. Feels stupid, suddenly, for saying anything out loud. Snake _does_ know, perfectly well. They both do. 

The newscaster drones on, but he doesn’t hear the words anymore. His eyes are stinging again, traitorous, _ridiculous_ , and he looks up at the ceiling to will the sensation away. Shivers a bit, with tiny goosebumps prickling over his arms even though it’s warm in the house. 

Beside him, his partner shifts a little. He feels Snake’s knee brush the side of his leg as he moves. 

“Otacon,” he says, then stops. “I, uh. _Shit_.” He rubs his face. “I’m lousy at this, I know. But. I owe you an apology.”

He blinks, bewildered.

“Why?”

“Look. In FOXHOUND, the higher ups didn’t give a rat’s ass if we lived or died, as long as we got the job done. It was just - the mission. That was it. Nothing else made a damn bit of difference. Then after that, when I was freelancing…” There’s a far-away look in his eyes, like he isn’t seeing the little room or the mildewed wallpaper or Otacon’s face in front of him. “Those guys would have shot us themselves if it helped the bottom line.”

He thinks about the hard white marks on his partner’s body, the way he’d startled at the touch of his hand in the dark, and feels sick.

“The point is… this shit is dangerous. People die all the time. Good men. _Professionals_. When you sneak around getting shot at for a living, that’s gonna catch up with you eventually.” He pauses, thinking hard. Choosing his words carefully. “Just – it doesn’t last forever. No one’s that good. I made my peace with that a long time ago.”

Snake sets his glass down on the table. Stares down at his hands for a moment before looking back at him, with an intensity in his expression that he can’t quite read.

“But that’s not the world you come from. Sometimes I forget that.”

Otacon sits rooted to the spot, taking it all in. Dizzy. Snake seems to be finished speaking, now, but it doesn’t matter – he hears the words behind the words; the thing his partner doesn’t say.

_You’re too emotional, Hal. Too soft._

And God help him, it’s the truth. He always has been, hasn’t he? 

_Sentiment_ – he hears the sneer oozing out of the word, his father’s voice in his head. Julie’s laughter; derisive, unkind. His sister’s accusing eyes. It’s always been his greatest weakness. The liability that lets his heart win out, when he needs to use his head.

He struggles to find his voice.

“I – I know I need to be – “ 

What? 

_Stronger? More practical? More ruthless?_

All of the above, probably. Anything at all but what he is. 

“Well, I mean… I know,” he finishes lamely. “I do know, believe me. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be _sorry_ , Hal. Jesus.” Incredibly – _impossibly_ – a warm, calloused hand is cradling his jaw as though it were something precious, thumb smoothing carefully over the day-old stubble on his cheek. “Don’t ever be sorry for that.”

This is so much the opposite of what he was expecting that he’s temporarily struck dumb.

Then there is Snake’s soft breath on his ear, the side of his neck; the quiet space between their mouths, just a hairsbreadth apart. Snake’s other hand is on his thigh, squeezing, kneading gently with his fingers. 

_Asking_.

It’s a question, all of it, and he freezes in place with one hand still braced on the sofa between them; blood pulsing in his ears, some distant part at the back of his brain flailing in an incredulous panic as he tries to think it through. Snake’s eyes are open, staring intently at him with a look of fixed concentration – very still now, as though Otacon were a sentry in the shadows poised to shoot.

One breath, and then another. A moment too long. Snake sees his hesitation, and draws back as gracefully as he had come. 

“That’s all right,” he says. “Anyway – I meant what I said. I apologize.”

He’s off the couch and gone, putting his empty glass beside the sink, before Otacon can collect himself enough to say anything at all. Somewhere down the hallway, the bathroom door clicks shut. 

******

His first thought, once his mind has unfrozen itself and begun creaking slowly back to life, is that he’s a hopeless, bumbling idiot who deserves whatever misery he gets. He breathes through his nose, curls his fingers into the sofa cushions; snags a hangnail on the fraying polyester, picks up the discarded wrapper from the oat bar on the coffee table. None of it feels real. 

He turns off the television, and stands there in the dark.

For an instant, he’s seized with a wild, terrible impulse to run. Walk outside, get in the car, and go. It’s a safe response, true to form; hatefully seductive. _Familiar_. It’s how he’d ended up on his own at sixteen – for better or worse – and in some ways, his life since then has been one continuous headlong flight from everything he ever wanted to change.

He has regrets, God knows. Too many to catalogue, or name, or remember.

But not _this_. 

So he turns his back on the bolted door and walks in the other direction, floorboards groaning like ghosts under his feet. One measured step at a time. Thinking about nothing at all.

In the bedroom, he very nearly loses his nerve. Takes off his jeans one fumbling leg at a time, and peels off his socks. Leaves the rest. Cleans his glasses on the hem of his shirt; a nervous habit, leftover from childhood. 

And finally, gets into bed alone. 

He’s sitting propped up half-upright against the headboard with a pillow at his back and his hands sweating where they’re twisted in the sheets, when the sound of the shower down the hall goes quiet. Snake appears in the doorway, still wet and dripping with a towel slung carelessly around his waist, and stops short.

His partner isn’t stupid. Neither of them are, for all that they might both act the part sometimes.

“Otacon…” Snake passes a hand over his eyes, just for a moment; the first sign he’s given of anything like frustration or sadness. “It’s fine. It’s… a lot. Shouldn’t have sprung that on you. If you don’t want to – ”

“I want to,” he blurts out, too quickly. They look at each other over Otacon’s knees, curled under the bedspread; an uncomfortable stalemate. 

_God_ , he thinks distantly. Even this, he can’t do right. 

Snake exhales. Tired. _Resigned_ , maybe, which seems somehow worse. But still, his eyes are soft. 

“Not tonight,” he says. “You’re a thinker, I know. That’s okay. Think on it.”

“I have. Believe me, I’ve thought already. I just… get stuck.” He swallows hard. Openly staring at his partner’s body, now, for the first time in two long years. “It’s a problem. I’m working on that.”

Snake stands still for a moment longer, watching him, as if gauging whether or not to take those words at face value. Then unwinds the towel – unhurried, allowing him to look if he wants to – and slips into bed beside him.

His heart is pounding in his throat again, but for several terrifying seconds nothing happens at all. Snake settles himself under the covers as if there’s nothing strange about any of this. Completely nude, careful not to touch. And then – without a word, turns onto his side, facing away; a mirror image of how it had been that first night and he _understands_ , then, with a sudden rush of gratitude.

This is as tremendous a display of trust as his partner is capable of making. Offering up his body, giving him space. Letting he take what he wants.

He reaches out again, the way he had before – but it’s different tonight; more real, more solid, frighteningly bright and clear in the unforgiving glow of the bedside lamp. The warm expanse of Snake’s back, with its fading bruises and older scars, still smooth under his tentative hand. A self-contained landscape in watercolor; a microcosm, maybe, of everything he’s always been afraid to see. 

_Too fast, too much, too close._

Sometimes, it feels safer not to look.

The hard wire frames of his glasses dig into the side of his face, pushed askew by the pillow, but he doesn’t want to move. Burrows deeper into the bedclothes. Swallowed up. Unreachable.

“Do you miss Alaska, still?”

If Snake is surprised by the apparent non sequitur, he doesn’t say so.

“I don’t really think that way. Never have. Life just is what it is.”

“I guess that makes sense.” 

It’s easier, all of it, now that they aren’t looking at each other. He watches tiny droplets of water soaking from Snake’s hair onto the pillow a few inches from his face. His fingers trace the hard curve of his partner’s flank, the tantalizing crease of muscle just above his hip. He grazes the trail of hair below Snake’s navel, almost by accident, and retreats to safer ground before either of them can react.

“It’s just… it seemed like you were happy there, at first. Weren’t you? The way you were, when I first showed up to drag you back. Out on your own, with the dogs. You were free.”

Snake snorts at that, sardonic. “That’s one way to put it.” 

And that’s fair, he knows. He remembers the empty liquor bottles behind the cabin, the sickly reek of alcohol mixed with vomit.

But still.

The silence grows and stretches like something alive in the room; tangible, but not unwelcome. 

“Sometimes, I wish I could go back and change things. Make different decisions. Not about everything, but – ” He trails off, stilling his hand for a moment while he gropes for what he wants to say. Can’t find the right words, but can’t back out now either. “I think I could’ve done better by the people I cared about, in a lot of ways. At the very least.”

“Ever think they could have done better by you?”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, exactly. He wishes he did. 

“I hadn’t thought about her in years, really. My sister. Or my dad. About what happened.” He lets out a shuddering breath. Too many memories. Old demons that won’t stay dead. “And now, I just… no matter what I do, I’m afraid it won’t be enough. That I’m going to let you down. _Again_. I keep thinking about you, in the river. How you looked. How it felt.”

He thinks about a lot more than that, but he doesn’t know how else how to explain – about the coppery-slick smell of blood on antiseptic wipes, and deafening silence on the radio. About the sound that water makes, in place of air.

Finally, he says what they both know; the truth he can’t get away from, as hard as he tries.

“It’s my fault we were there. You know it was. I don’t know how to live with that.”

Snake breathes carefully under his hand, and doesn’t argue.

He’s drawn to the scars without meaning to be, fingers tracing the ridges and irregularities he encounters with a kind of helpless fascination; as if he were blind, reading a story in Braille. All the things that could have been different. That could have been endings, or never happened at all. He squints at the last yellow-grey traces of the bruising from the tanker, runs the flat of his hand over a vaguely crescent-shaped mark between Snake’s ribs, and doesn’t know what to feel.

When his partner finally speaks, his voice is quiet.

“The one on my shoulder was the first time I was ever shot,” he says. “Happened in Chechnya. I lost a lot of blood – subclavian artery. Back out with the team in three days flat.”

Otacon touches it; gently, as if it might still hurt after all these years. Feels the clean, circular divot just under the collarbone in front. The exit wound is larger, rough like crackled glass.

He scoots forward a bit, still wrapped in his protective cocoon; near enough that the edge of Snake’s foot brushes his lower leg under the sheets. Fingers a long, thin mark, straight as a seam just above his partner’s hip.

“What about this?” The question slips out in a whisper; curious, now, in spite of himself.

“Some dumb fuck on night patrol in Honduras. Combat knife, in close. Lucky shot under the edge of the flak vest.”

Snake settles more fully on his stomach, his movements slow and drowsy. Unguarded. Giving him easier access to the rest. 

Shaking a little, half-terrified at his own daring, he sits fully upright in the bed. Runs his palm one more time over Snake’s back for courage – _please, God_ – struggles out from under the bedspread, and slides one leg over the top to straddle his partner’s hips.

It feels awkward at first, but Snake hums his approval, reaching back with one hand to stroke the outer edge of his knee. The gesture is so unexpectedly gentle – such a cautious movement, careful not to startle – that he has to close his eyes, take a steadying breath to collect himself. He balances for a moment in the air, precarious, before settling back on his heels to take everything in.

Stable. Grounded. 

_Okay_.

The whole of Snake’s body is stretched out beneath him now, strong and hard under his hands; exposed for his perusal. The sheet slips down to give a glimpse of his powerful legs, the tight, perfect curve of his ass, and he’s fairly certain that he’s never been this aroused in his life. 

The new vantage point allows him to use both hands, now, and he does – slides his palms up along the smooth muscle on either side of Snake’s spine, using just enough pressure to elicit a deep breath and a loosening, somehow, of the tension in his arms. On his partner’s upper back, just at the base of the neck over the delicate vertebrae, are a twin set of indentations – symmetrical and oddly precise, like a pair of stud earrings in a box. Like battery terminals, or electrodes on a circuit. 

Like burns.

He runs his thumb over them, momentarily transfixed, and for the first time Snake hesitates.

“You know that one,” he murmurs at last. “Ocelot’s interrogation, at Shadow Moses.”

That brings him up short.

_You don’t control everything, Hal. You know you don’t._

_Let it go._

Before he can think too hard about what he’s doing, he leans down, feels the solid warmth of his partner’s body through his T-shirt – blessedly normal now, no fever – and presses a single, careful, open-mouthed kiss over the marks.

The ghost of a shiver flickers across the muscles in Snake’s back, and he makes a sound into the pillow that lances straight through to the core of Otacon’s stomach. 

Emboldened by this, he repeats the motion – lingering, tasting the skin, breathing in the clean shower smells of soap and shampoo. He can feel Snake’s muscular thighs under his groin now, flexing up against him, giving just enough contact to make him want to press down harder. 

He shifts himself further back, just a bit, to clench his legs around Snake’s hips while he stretches out carefully along the length of his body; kissing his shoulders, his neck from behind. He’s sweating a little, can’t quite control the trembling in his hands but he wills his mind quiet – _enough_ , for once in his cursed life; lets his eyes fall closed, rubs his growing hardness against the warm crease of Snake’s ass and _God_ , it’s better than anything he’s ever felt. 

“Turn over,” he whispers, in a voice so unforgivably ragged he scarcely recognizes it as his own, and Snake is on his back before he’s finished speaking.

The view, now, is almost more than he can bear.

He’s seen Snake’s cock before – _of course_ he has, because it’s damn near impossible not to see it occasionally when they’ve spent the past two years living on top of each other in a series of two-small spaces. Snake has never been especially shy or modest about his body, or seemed to have any particular feelings about it at all apart from its practical use to him for accomplishing things. 

But he’s never seen it like this. Flushed red; hard and straining, fully erect. It would be enough to make him feel weak in the knees if he weren’t already crouching low and light-headed, bracing his arms on the mattress. 

As he watches, Snake wraps his hand around it, smears his thumb through the shiny drop of precum beading at the tip. He stares down at Otacon with his eyes heavy-lidded, pupils blown wide in the soft light and gives himself a lazy stroke – touching himself to the sight of Otacon knelt between his legs, stomach visibly tensing a bit at the sensation – and Otacon can’t wait a single second more.

He drops to his elbows and covers Snake’s hand with his own; runs his parted lips once, twice over the head of his dick to savor the salty-bitter taste that’s strongest there, and swallows him down to the root in one smooth motion.

Somewhere above him, Snake makes a glorious choking sound.

The experience is more erotic than he could ever have imagined, and he gives himself over to it with a desperate enthusiasm he didn’t know he was capable of. _Dear God_ , he wants this. Wants it more than anything, wants Dave to feel good – warm and alive and safe, thrusting up into his mouth with little stuttering jerks of his hips like he can’t help himself. Wants to feel Solid Snake, the soldier, lose control and shatter apart in his hands.

He palms himself through his boxers as he works over Snake’s cock with the kind of single-minded concentration he usually reserves for a deliciously difficult hacking job, taking him deeper, gagging on the fullness in his throat; pulls back just enough to press the flat of his tongue against the smooth, leaking glans while Snake fists his hand in the bedspread beside them. 

His partner is close now, he can tell – stroking unsteady fingers through his hair in a mute but urgent warning, breathing hard, and Otacon quickens his pace; slides his other hand lower to tease the delicate skin behind Snake’s balls, feels them pull up tight against his body as finally, he drags them both over the edge together.

He’s dimly aware of spilling himself into his hand, making an embarrassing mess of his undershorts like a horny teenager in the backseat of a car, swallowing hard around Snake as his body convulses beneath him; running his hand up and down along one thigh, the taut cord of muscle running from his hip to his groin; slowly, softly. Stroking his fingers through the coarse hair around his dick as it slowly softens in his mouth.

When there’s nothing left, he’s finally still. Rests his forehead on Snake’s leg, let’s his eyes fall closed, and breathes.

There have been precious few happenings in his life that he would call perfect, and not as many ‘good’ as there probably ought to be if the universe were a more charitable place. Average, maybe; two and a half stars out of five. There have been long periods where ‘passable’ would be a stretch. But at this particular moment, sprawled half-naked on the bed with Snake touching the side of his face and nowhere else in the world to be, he wouldn’t change a single thing. 

For several seconds – perhaps longer – nothing moves at all.

“That,” Snake says flatly, still a little breathless, “is a skill set we’ve been underutilizing.”

He laughs out loud at that, feeling too utterly spent to argue.

“What do you think I was doing all those years in college? It wasn’t all dissertations and anime watch parties, you know.”

“Getting a fucking ridiculous number of degrees, I thought. Engineering shit. You’ve been holding out.”

“That’s what it says on my transcript,” he says. “Arguably, not the most useful thing I learned. Depends on your point of view, I guess.”

He nuzzles into the hot crease of muscle where Snake’s thigh meets his body, coarse hairs tickling his nose. Can’t quite believe that he’s allowed to do this, now; touching, rubbing his cheek against the skin, breathing in the musky smell that lingers there. It’s almost enough to make his spent cock stir with interest.

Snake’s hand is warm on the back of his neck. Twitching a little at the contact; oversensitive. 

“Gonna have to give me a few minutes, if you want another round. I’m not twenty-two anymore.”

He groans. “ _God_ , I wish I could. I’m not either. Not sure I’d want to be, though, if that’s the trade-off.”

With a last, reluctant kiss pressed to Snake’s impossibly flat stomach, he pushes himself up to hands and knees and turns his attention to more practical things. Discards the mess he’s made of his boxer shorts; and after a moment’s consideration, pulls off the T-shirt as well because _why the hell not_ , at this point. He crawls the last few feet to the head of the bed and collapses there in a languid, boneless heap.

Snake turns to face him; a clear invitation, and lies there still and pliant as Otacon curls up against his chest. Warm and sated, skin-to-skin with someone he trusts for the first time in more years than he cares to count, he’s drifting hazily towards sleep when Snake’s voice rumbles against the top of his head.

“I get it, about your sister. I mean – my experiences there are a little different. Obviously. But… yeah. Family’s hard.”

It’s not really a question, but he nods anyway. For what feels like an impossibly long stretch of time, seconds piling up into minutes or hours or years, he doesn’t trust himself to speak. 

“That’s not an excuse.”

“Didn’t say it was.”

He lies there quietly for a time, listening. Breathing, with Snake’s chin resting like a solid weight in his hair. He doesn’t need to see his partner’s face to picture his expression.

“Listen,” Snake says, finally. “Two years ago, you asked me if I wanted to pull up stakes and be a renegade terrorist with you.”

“I… don’t think that’s _exactly_ what I said. If memory serves, I believe I outlined the dangers of unchecked Metal Gear proliferation in a very professional way, and suggested that the two of us might make an effective team. In service of the greater good. World peace, and all that.”

Snake shrugs in a “ _potato, po-tah-to”_ sort of way, unconcerned.

“The point is, we’re doing it. Right?”

“We’re, ah – doing something, yeah. I guess we are?” He studies the perfect dusky nipple a few inches from his face, still partly hard, tracing the darkened skin around it with the edge of one finger. Terrified. Daring. Feels the answering huff of breath against his neck.

“Ha. That, too. What I’m trying to say, is – my answer hasn’t changed.”

This feels true enough to be worth something, and he tries hard to let himself believe it; holds onto the promise implied by the words with everything he has. 

Things do change; answers, and all the rest. He’s not naïve enough to think they don’t. But not today. Not for a long time, perhaps, if they’re both very lucky and fate is kind. 

_And maybe_ , he thinks with his glasses buried somewhere in the hopeless tangle of sheets underneath him and Snake’s arm clasped tight around his back, _that really is the point_. That life is a study in contrasts, and it all comes out in the wash. They’ve staked their claim on the fringes, both of them in their own discordant ways; in all the shades and shades of grey.

So many varied ways to drown. Striking out for the surface, as best they can; a kind of absolution.

_One-two-three-four-five._

_Breathe._

_Breathe._

He wraps himself in the bedspread, sated and comfortable and _sure_. 

Covers his head. Closes his eyes, and tries again to swim.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you’ve made it all the way through to the end with me, thank you! I hope it was worth the ride. <3 And if you’ve enjoyed my little ramblings, that makes me very happy – so feel free to drop a note or leave a comment, and let me know your thoughts. 
> 
> I don’t tend to post much on Tumblr (jenleigh1.tumblr.com), but I can also be found there if you want to reach out. 
> 
> I’ve loved the MGS games for a long time, but I’m relatively new to the online fandom. There’s a lot more I want to write about these ridiculous boys and their feelings, so there should be more coming down the pike before long.


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